Straw Dogs

This powerful and brilliant book is an essential guide to the new Millennium. Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions. Who are we, and why are we here? John Gray's answers will shock most of us deeply. This is the most exhilarating book I have read since Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene -- J. G. Ballard My book of the year was Straw Dogs. I read it once, I read it twice and took notes. I arranged to meet its author so I could publicize the book - I thought it that good ... a devastating critique of liberal humanism, and all of it set out in easy-to-digest (although hard-to-swallow) apercus -- Will Self * New Statesman * One of the most important books published this year, and will probably prove to be one of the most important this century ... nobody can hope to understand the times in which we live unless they have read Straw Dogs -- Sue Corrigan * Mail on Sunday * There is unlikely to be a more provocative or more compelling book published this year than Straw Dogs ... Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain -- Jason Cowley * Observer * Relentless in its upheaval of the ideology and moral framework most of us inhabit like a big comfy armchair. Progress, freedom, selfhood, morality, justice and technology - all are turned around so you doubt which direction you are going, if any. -- Marcus Coates * Frieze * A complex and concentrated read -- Hugh Lawson Tancred * Spectator * John Gray's pessimistic but challenging view of humankind among the animals, Straw Dogs enraged and engaged me more than any other book this year -- Jim Crace * Times * Gray is undeniably a force to be reckoned with.He is the most lucid and compelling writer about political theory since Isaiah Berlin, and he was understandably hailed by Will Self as "the most important living philosopher -- Johann Hari * The Independent * Exhilarating -- Daisy Waugh * Herald *

John Gray has been Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His many books include Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia and Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life.