A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

I hate this book. I'm absolutely certain that a really good book could have been written about these events and circumstances, so it's an absolute tragedy that this one was instead.

This book lacks any kind of structure or coherence. It jumps forward and backward through time, between different topics and narratives, from person to person, seemingly without rhyme or reason. It is impossible to follow any sequence, keep track of any individual, or place any event in time. The book reads like it was cut into pieces and pasted back together random. The author injects his opinions and prejudices into the book frequently and obnoxiously, and makes no distinction between established fact and wild conjecture. The most egregious example is the entire chapter about Charles Nicolle's research in the early twentieth century leading to Hongoltz-Hetling's completely baseless theory that Toxoplasma gondii may be responsible, to some unspecified degree, for the behaviour of some or all of the bears and humans involved. It's pure speculation but presented almost as fact.

And each chapter begins with a quotation about bears, or that mentions bears, or that just has the word "bear" in it. These quotations don't relate to the subject of the chapter, nor to anything else that I could see. They're just there because the author liked them, I guess.

This book is infuriatingly bad. It should not exist.