Liz Petro

Definitely not worth your time. “It is a book in which humans crowd in front of octopuses, both literally and figuratively, and which, in working towards its shallow goal of convincing people that animals are sentient beings, almost never grapples with the moral questions of keeping wild beings in captivity, subjecting them to questionable experiments, and intruding upon them in the wild. In fact, Sy Montgomery’s text lauds and leverages these practices in its quest to prove that octopuses are just as special as us wonderful humans.” “ The fact that the author focuses solely on the information gleaned from the experiment, but doesn’t dwell on the inherent problems of mutilating animals, is indicative of her perpetually myopic perspective — or at least a lack of courage to wrestle with the tougher questions that her facts and plot events evoke.” “It’s clear what humans have that animals don’t: hubris, such hubris. In The Soul of an Octopus, octopuses are pets to be petted, anthropomorphized, and displayed for stupid humans to ooh and ahh at, as the souls of the octopuses wilt beneath the belief that they must become ours for us to understand them.” -H. Huff