by Alan Rabinowitz
Island Press, September 2014
The jaguar (Panthera onca) struck fear, awe, and reverence into the Aztec and Mayan civilizations that elevated the big cat to deity status in pre-Columbian North America. The supple jungle creature has more recently served as muse to biologist Alan Rabinowitz, CEO of the nonprofit, wild feline–focused conservation organization Panthera. And the jaguar inspired his latest book, An Indomitable Beast.
In the book, Rabinowitz briefly recounts his own transformation from a child with a debilitating and isolating stutter to a preeminent big-cat conservationist, with jaguars as his pseudospiritual guides. But he spends the bulk of the book detailing the rise and fall of the jaguar: from Pleistocene Eurasian immigrant to the New World, to Mesoamerican god, to beleaguered predator.
Positing the jaguar as sort of a conservation poster cat, Rabinowitz relates the latest research on its dwindling populations and how novel management strategies ...
