“There should be at least one animal book under every tree. Bears: A Brief History fills the requirement nicely. … [A] little gem.”
——William Grimes, The New York Times

“Brunner adroitly details the ways bears have been demonized, revered, and anthropomorphized by cultures that see them in contradictory terms, both lazy and fierce, wily and dim-witted.”
——The New Yorker

“Brunner's ... richly informative book ... shows that our special relationship with bears ... has been, since prehistoric times, the site of some of our deepest fears and wishes.”
——John Carey, The Sunday Times

“Moving with a brisk tread between actual bear behaviour and the myths and tales that partner it, Brunner reminds us with dry wit and great illustrations that we get bears wrong.” Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

“Bears is a veritable fount of arcane ursulania and a delight on every page, not least in the plethora of engravings and illustrations; the perfect Christmas book.” Philip Hoare, The Sunday Telegraph

“As this beguiling book makes clear, the bear is among the most fundamentally unknowable of all the wild creatures of the earth.”
—— Sinclair Mckay, The Daily Telegraph

“Brunner has put together a wonderful book, a vivid cultural history of interaction between human beings and bears.”
——Simon Barnes, The Times

“[A] fascinating study of all things ursine and the special role that these often woefully mistreated creatures have played in our lives.”
——The Sunday Times

“Bernd Brunner’s book is a perfectly polished gem that studies our shared history from the early attempts at classification, through the various hideous cruelties we have inflicted on them to the wonderful discovery that despite our feelings for them, bears are not interested in us at all.”
——Toby Clements, The Daily Telegraph

“A small, beautifully designed book, Bears examines the shared history of people and bears: a sad, often brutal story punctuated here and there with humor and charm.”
——The New York Observer

★Rights sold: Italy, Turkey and Japan.
★The purpose of this book is to explore the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective of cultural connotation and trace the legendary role of animals in the history of human civilization.

This engaging book examines the shared history of people and bears. Hopscotching through history, literature, and science, Bernd Brunner presents a rich compendium of the interactions between the two species and explores how bears have become central figures in our inventory of myths and dreams. He reveals the remarkable extent to which human feelings about bears have been—and still are—mixed. People have venerated, killed, caressed, tortured, nurtured, eaten, worshipped, and despised bears. Interestingly, the varied dealings of humans with bears raise the same question over and again: do our images of bears have much in common with the animal as it really is?

The book uncovers new and little-known stories and facts about bears in European, North American, Japanese, Russian, and South and Southeast Asian cultures. Taken together, these perspectives show us new things about the animals we thought we knew so well. Quirky and bizarre anecdotes, scientific information on bears threatened with extinction in some areas, a discussion of the phenomenon of “bearanoia,” and more than one hundred historical illustrations contribute to this unique account of the shared history between bears and humans and the continuing presence of bears in our personal and collective dreams.

Bernd Brunner

works at the crossroads of literature, science and history. He has written for Lapham's Quarterly, The Paris Review Daily, Courrier International, TLS, Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, Aeon, Quartz, The Public Domain Review, Cabinet, and various German newspapers and magazines. A fellow of the Logan Nonfiction Program, Bernd has lectured at the Bard Graduate Center, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, the Goethe Institutes of Washington D.C. and San Francisco, the Bancroft Library and the Botanical Garden of the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium (Princeton Architectural Press 2005).