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Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself by David Toomey ’78

September 20, 2024

Tags Alumni Book

(Scribner’s, 2024).

The author, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, takes us on a fast-paced and entertaining tour of playful animals and the scientists who study them. The publisher notes, “From octopuses on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to brown bears on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, we follow adventurous researchers as they design and conduct experiments seeking answers to new, intriguing questions: When did play first appear in animals? How does play develop the brain, and how did it evolve? Are the songs and aerial acrobatics of birds the beginning of avian culture? Is fairness in dog play the foundation of canine ethics? And does play direct and possibly accelerate evolution?

“Monkeys belly flop, dolphins tail-walk, elephants mud-slide, crows dive-bomb, and octopuses bounce balls. These activities are various, but all are play, and as Toomey explains, animal play can be defined as a distinct behavior that is ongoing and open-ended, purposeless and provisional — rather like natural selection. Through a close examination of both natural selection and play, Toomey argues that life itself is fundamentally playful.”

A reviewer from The Atlantic described the book like this: “Wry . . . In the end, the belief that animals are no less complex and mysterious than humans prevails in Kingdom of Play. Toomey understands that if we always reduce play to some form of utility, we are returning animals to the status of automatons. As the book winds down, his own enjoyment of the subject comes to the fore.”