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

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!

Fascinating and well delivered

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

Terrible narrator

This narrator is absolutely awful. Her attempts to emote made me cringe. Cannot listen to it.

Thorough philosophical exploration

Thorough philosophical exploration of the question whether animals outside of humans understand death. I think I prefer “when elephants weep” more for the breadth of topics. But this was solid.

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.

Unbelievably irritating narration

The book is fascinating, but the narration is nearly intolerable. It’s like she was pretending to read this at an open mic night for laughs. This is why authors should narrate their own books.

Absolutely intolerable narration

The narrator’s attempt to read in some ridiculous dramatic fashion makes the book unlistenable. I’m so annoyed. The content seems like it’s so interesting and I want to listen to it so much, but the way this woman reads is SO distracting that I can’t even listen to the content, all I can focus on is her ridiculous theatrical “performance!” Can someone please tell these people to just READ the book- it’s not a broadway play for heavens sake! I hope I can get a refund for this because I couldn’t get past the second chapter.

I feel badly for the author whose fascinating work is ruined by this narration.