All Creatures Great and Small

From the adventurer and author of The Fox and the Hound, “a memoir of his travels as a photo-journalist specialising in animal stories” (The Telegraph).

His historical work Those About to Die inspired the Gladiator movies. His novel, The Fox and the Hound, became a timeless classic—and a Disney movie. And his youthful obsession with magic resulted in Memoirs of a Sword Swallower. Few people have lived life more fully and colorfully than author Daniel P. Mannix. Throughout all his adventures and accomplishments, his love of nature and animals sustained him. In All Creatures Great and Small, he shares tales of his “Mannix Menagerie.”

From his childhood in Pennsylvania, which included his first pets (and his first odoriferous experience with a skunk), to his myriad encounters with wildlife as an adult, Mannix details—in captivating prose and fascinating photos—the amazing personalities and innate traits of the animals he’s loved: Rani the cheetah, Jupo the spider monkey, Ottie the otter, Águila the bald eagle, vampire bats, kinkajous, and more from the wild kingdom of his life.

Daniel P. Mannix was an award-winning American author and journalist, as well as a magician and filmmaker. Mannix’s magazine articles about his experiences in the carnival, where he performed under the stage name “The Great Zadma,” became popular in the mid-1940s and were compiled with the assistance of his wife in the book Step Right Up! His dozens of books and extensive essays range in subject from children’s animal stories, environmental issues, and hunting accounts to historical examinations of the Hellfire Club, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Roman gladiatorial games. Mannix was particularly interested in the Wizard of Oz canon and composed a biography of L. Frank Baum for American Heritage magazine in the 1960s.