[Kathryn Shevelow]'s For the Love of Animals appears to ride this wave; with its fairly ordinary title and intention to explore a well-known historical period, it seems to open itself up to questions about its capacity to shed new light on such a carefully illuminated topic.

Shevelow's ability to pair the events of the French Revolution or the African slave trade with animal-welfare setbacks in England is simply breathtaking, as is her refusal to draw an easy line between love and cruelty when it comes to the complexity of human motivations.

There's her anecdote about a dog put on trial in the 1700s for stealing morsels from a plate and being busted by the parrot who could scream, "thief, thief." And the one about Lord Chancellor Thomas Erskine who adopted and named the leeches once used to bleed him, even bringing them out at a dinner party to prove that they also "felt grateful to him for saving them."