#bill schutt

[sicknessinmotion]

loving cannibal

natalie diaz // shayla raquel // artwork by @quezify // stephen crane // bill schutt // ada limon.

[midnights-wish]

Which book(s) should I get next?

'I Am Not a Serial Killer', by Dan Wells

'Women', by Charles Bukowski

'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo', by Taylor Jenkins Reid

'Cannibalism', by Bill Schutt & Patricia Wynne

'The Poisoner's Handbook', by Deborah Blum

'Just show me the results, woman!'

Voting ended onApr 17, 2023

Full titles for the last two, as they didn't fit:

'Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History'

'The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York'

So, I always like to buy five books at a time, in order to avoid a gigantic physical to-be-read pile. I'm almost through my current one, so I want to decide which books to order next. I've already settled on two, since they're sequels to what I read recently, but can't decide on the other three, since I have a few contestants I can't really choose between. So I figured I'd try settling this using a poll -- I'll order the three books that have the most votes.

Thank you for helping!

[petertqrk]

In a telling side story, Raymond Rogers provided another example of just how attractive the word cannibalism is to the media. “I took this story of dinosaur cannibalism to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings, and I called it “Conspecific Scavenging,” which is what I think it is. I remember that a guy from Science News looked at it, but nobody else really took much notice at all. I went home and thought about it, and I was like, ‘You know, why don’t I just call it cannibalism?’ So I did . . . and after that the story got in Nature and it was on the front page of Google News for about a week.”

“Well there you go,” I responded with a laugh. “That word does set something off in us.”

“Right,” Rogers agreed. “Before I knew it, USA Today was talking about dinosaurs, chianti, and fava beans.”

— Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History

[sometimesreading]

Recsmas 2019 - Day 21: A Nonfiction Book

Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt

This book was a lot of fun to read! (Not to mention moving in with new people and putting the book with my cookbooks…) There were some really interesting tidbits here, but sometimes it seemed a little...surface level? Definitely worth the read nonetheless!

[deadpresidents]

These are the types of books that @gohst-prncss-awez gets really excited about when publishers send me review copies. And that is why I never allow myself to fall asleep before she does.

If you’re interested in creeping out your significant other, the books pictured are: •Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (BOOK | KINDLE) by Bill Schutt •The Occult, Witchcraft & Magic: An Illustrated History by Christopher Dell •Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found (BOOK | KINDLE) by Frances Larson

[nprbooks]

It's gruesome, but from a scientific standpoint, there's a predictable calculus for when humans and animals go cannibal. That’s according to a new book by vertebrate zoologist Bill Schutt. In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, Schutt explains that far more humans — and animals — have dipped into the world of cannibalism than you might have imagined.

Cannibalism: It's 'Perfectly Natural,' A New Scientific History Argues

Image: An illustration from 1875 depicts the survivors of the frigate Cospatrick, which caught fire off South Africa's Cape of Good Hope in November 1874. Of more than 470 people on board, just three ultimately survived, and they were reduced to cannibalism. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

[universitybookstore]

Pardon me for bringing up the subject right before Sunday dinner, but I've been reading the most fascinating book, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt. You see, cannibalism isn't as rare, in humans or in nature as a whole, as one might think, given certain horror movies or tabloid headlines; in fact, it may play an important part in the evolution of species. Now how about after dinner, we pour a nice Chianti and I'll read you a few of my favorite passages.

[principleofplenitude]

Spadefoot toad tadpoles eat other tadpoles. Some snail mothers lay two sets of eggs—one intended to hatch and the other intended to be eaten by those who hatch. (Schutt calls these “kids’ meals.”) Cichlid fish that practice mouthbrooding, in which the parents protect their eggs and babies from predators by carrying them around inside their mouths, sometimes get hungry and swallow their own children. Whoops! In what Schutt calls “an extreme act of parental care,” black lace-weaver spider moms call their hungry babies over and allow their children to eat them alive. But, as Schutt points out, we are discriminating about what we call cannibalism. Historical claims about savages eating one another are sometimes wildly hyperbolic, or lacking in proof, Schutt finds. Accusations are often undergirded by racism and opportunism. When Spain was exploring and exploiting the Caribbean during the 1500s, a 1510 papal decree that Christians were morally justified in punishing cannibals meant that on “islands where no cannibalism had been reported previously, man-eating was suddenly determined to be a popular practice.Yet Renaissance-era Europeans who would have been disgusted by reports of people-eating rituals in faraway places nonetheless practiced what Schutt called medicinal cannibalism. “Upper-class types and even members of the British Royalty ‘applied, drank or wore’ concoctions prepared from human body parts,” Schutt writes. And blood was consumed to treat epilepsy. So what does cannibalism look like in a culture that doesn’t attach as much stigma to it? Like many other peoples, the Chinese practiced survival cannibalism during wars and famines; an imperial edict in 205 B.C. even made it permissible for “starving Chinese” to exchange “one another’s children, so that they could be consumed by non-relatives.” But, according to historical sources cited by Schutt, the Chinese also practiced “learned cannibalism.” In Chinese books written during Europe’s Middle Ages, human flesh was occasionally cited as an exotic delicacy. In times of great hunger or when a relative was sick, children would sometimes cut off their flesh and prepare it in a soup for their elders. One researcher found “766 documented cases of filial piety” spanning more than 2,000 years. “The most commonly consumed body part was the thigh, followed by the upper arm;” the eyeball was banned by edict in 1261.

“Cannibalism” from Slate