Capsule Reviews

An Indomitable Beast, What If?, Superintelligence, and Dataclysm

Written byBob Grant

| 3 min read

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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