This is a great book, detailed concise. It is wonderful from a Historical standpoint and for someone wanting simply to know the where and why of chickens. It is not light reading but it is the best fact filled book out there, most chicken books are too "ditzy". This is not the case here.Fact filled and entertaining, could use a few pictures but excellent just the same.

From egg to poult to hen to rooster to featherbed and deepfreeze, from the ancient Egyptians to neo-feudal Southeast Asia to the iconographic Petaluma chicken ranch to the modern industialized chicken culture, this book covers everything you could ever need, want or just happen upon with respect to the chicken---except for one thing: it totally ignores the Chicken MacNugget!! Nonetheless (or perhaps because of this), it is not just a manual for the chicken fancier, the cockfight afficionado or the backyard farmer. It is truly an examplary product of a "LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION", and deserving of much wider appreciation than it has received to date. Page Smith, a well-known popular historian, co-taught an interdisciplinary seminar with a biologist named Charles Daniel entitiled "The Chicken" for undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the early 1970's. No doubt some initially perceived the course title as a joke, but they were wrong. Somewhere along the line, someone injected some intellectual rigor and real insight into the course syllabus. With the aid of their teachers, the students performed a tour de force of research, covering every facet of the chicken from cultural, historical, religious, biological, agricultural and even epistemological points of view. The professors took the student work and fashioned it into a book that is a classic in every sense of the word. "THE CHICKEN BOOK" is a beautifully written minor masterpiece of historic arcana, zoological detail, small-scale poultry management, veterinary medicine, cultural anthropology, blood-sport historiography and culinary arts. Long out of print and hard to find, the book well deserves this new edition. Whether or not you have a specific interest in chickens, this is well worth reading. As an example of what an active intelligence can do with a relatively commonplace and mundane topic, this book was way ahead of its time!!

I live in a small, um, somewhat rustic village not far from Sacramento, California. In the sixties, there came to the town, so the local lore goes, artisans, who tended to live somewhat communally. They ultimately brought chickens to live with them, also communally. When the sixties were over, and the artisans moved on to state jobs and law school, the chickens remained. And were fruitful. And multiplied. And multiply still, as well as serving as mobile speed bumps, tourist attractions, points of political controversy (Chased and attacked chickens, particularly adults, especially roosters, have been known to retaliate in kind, to people who treat them fowlly: actions are afoot to collect ((nap?)) the current chickens and replace them with non-aggressive breeds ((Hey, it's California, after all))),and t-shirt and advertising icons. All in all, it's an idyllic little place that resembles nothing so much as say, the set for Murder She Wrote, if you happened to toss in some palm trees and some chickens along with the pines in the town square. Think Norman Rockwell. Think Norman Rockwell on nitrous oxide. It's a place where nobody sleeps very late, where nobody really has to go hungry, and where approximately every other resident is a chicken.

But I've lived there for a while, so I know these things. Paige Smith's book was out of print for a long while (But now thanks to U of Georgia P, the folks who brought back William Hedgepeth's The Hog Book--there's a pattern here), but now you can read and know these things as well.

The chickens will be grateful.

The personalities, prejudices and courage of the Founding Fathers come alive in the give and take of the debates of the Continental Congress. We, who can see the results, can little doubt what each of them knew, that they were inspired by a higher power. I feel greatful to be a descendent. Dewey F. Brignone