
Playing Possum
How Animals Understand Death
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Narrated by:
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Lisa S. Ware
When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.
With humor and empathy, Susana Monso tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monso, one of today's leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.
Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.
©2021, 2022 Susana Monso; English translation copyright 2024 by Princeton University Press (P)2024 TantorListeners also enjoyed...









Fascinating topic, well written, terrible narration
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I wanted an overview of what science knows about this topic and it’s more a philosophical discussion that includes some of the science. There’s some interesting info, but that angle didn’t resonate well with me.
The narration is also maybe the worst I’ve encountered in an audiobook. The cadence and tone was distracting and hard to pay attention to.
Bad narration, not what I expected
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Author presents an interesting and relatively new field of study while expanding implications and evidence. Interesting!
Interesting field of study / engaging performance
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Fascinating and well delivered
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Terrible narrator
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Thorough philosophical exploration
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The narration is unbearable.
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Unbelievably irritating narration
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I feel badly for the author whose fascinating work is ruined by this narration.
Absolutely intolerable narration
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