Playing Possum

How Animals Understand Death

By: Susana Monsó, Mark Rowlands - foreword

Narrated by: Lisa S. Ware

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom.

With humor and empathy, Susana Monso tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monso, one of today's leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own.

Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

©2021, 2022 Susana Monso; English translation copyright 2024 by Princeton University Press (P)2024 Tantor

Bad narration, not what I expected

I dove into this without much context and I would caution anyone interested in this to know what you’re getting into. This is written by a philosopher.

I wanted an overview of what science knows about this topic and it’s more a philosophical discussion that includes some of the science. There’s some interesting info, but that angle didn’t resonate well with me.

The narration is also maybe the worst I’ve encountered in an audiobook. The cadence and tone was distracting and hard to pay attention to.

Fascinating topic, well written, terrible narration

Very interesting material with an unusual (ie, philosophical) slant. However, I found the narrator unbearable, almost insulting. It is a testament to the worth of the book that I persevered. I apologize for being so harsh on the narrator, who I am sure thought she was helping bring the book alive, but unfortunately, as other reviews suggest, her delivery discouraged some readers from continuing to listen. My advice to such readers is: stick with it. The topic is important.

Fascinating and well delivered

The book, admittedly, is not for everyone but it's well researched and narrated with passion by Lisa Ware.

Interesting field of study / engaging performance

The narrator gets a bad rap in the review—she’s actually really great! Science books can be hard to follow with monotone readers. This worked really well to keep me engaged. I wonder how much of the criticism of the reader has some veiled misogyny.

Author presents an interesting and relatively new field of study while expanding implications and evidence. Interesting!

The narration is unbearable.

The subject matter is fascinating but I can't tolerate the narrator's unnatural, nonsensical cadance and the bizarre emphasis on words that shouldn't be empathized. I can't listen beyond the first chapter. I hope to get my money back from Audible so I can purchase a paper copy. I am so sorry for this talented author that her work is presented this way and I hope attempted listeners will try again with a paper copy.