Sheep

Philip Armstrong is Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies. His books include What Animals Mean (2008).

In Sheep, a superb volume that more than meets the high bar set in the Reaktion Books Animal Series, the animal-studies scholar Philip Armstrong notes that no other domestic animal fades from view, even as we use it, quite as completely as the sheep before setting this situation to rights. In six chapters with titles such as Sheepishness and A Sheep-shaped World, each graced with gorgeous illustrations in natural and cultural history ranging from The exuberantly polycerate Jacob Sheep that can have up to six horns to Don Quixotes ovine delusion, Armstrong produces a sheep manifesto thats both delightful and disturbing.