About this episode

Blake Smith interviews Dr. Brian Regal about his book 'Darwin and the Monsters' and the history of cryptozoology.

Blake welcomes back Dr. Brian Regal - historian of science, technology, and medicine, and now Professor Emeritus at Kean University - to talk about his final academic book, Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology . Regal has been a MonsterTalk guest since the show was still in single digits, and he was the first guest to reach out to the podcast rather than the other way around. He has also been sitting on this particular book for a very long time: he first floated the title on this show back in 2013, and then spent more than a decade writing everything else instead. Karen is away in the UK promoting Beyond Words , so this episode is a two-hander between Blake and an old friend. The book runs monsters forward from the classical world - Lucretius, Pliny, Aristotle, and a Sumerian hero fighting a monster in the oldest story we have - through the Middle Ages, the age of curiosities, and into the modern hunt for anomalous primates. 🔦 In This Episode Why the book is priced the way it is, and Blake's advice to check the library before the bookstore - a small tangent on academic publishing and the old "priced to rent" sticker era. How Darwin and the Monsters almost…

People in this episode

Host: Blake Smith

Guest: Dr. Brian Regal

Topics covered

• cryptozoology
• Darwin
• history of science
• monsters
• academic publishing

Keywords

• Darwin
• monsters
• cryptozoology
• academic publishing
• history of science

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Kean University

Books & works: Darwin and the Monsters: The Long History of Cryptozoology

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