Excerpt from Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The animal remains a feathered Swiss Army Knife, a multipurpose beast that provides us with what we want in a given time and place. This plasticity that makes it the most valuable of all domesticated animals has become useful in tracing our own history. The chicken is a kind of avian Zelig, and since it is an uncanny mirror of our changing human desires, goals, and intentions—a prestige object, a truth teller, a miraculous elixir, a tool of the devil, an exorcist, or the source of fabulous wealth—it is a marker for human exploration, expansion, entertainment, and beliefs. Archaeologists now use simple mesh screens to gather bird bones that can tell the story of how, when, and where humans lived, while complex algorithms and high-throughput computing make it possible for biologists to trace the chicken's genetic past, which is so closely tied to our own. And neuroscientists studying the long-abused chicken brain are uncovering unsettling signs of a deep intelligence as well as intriguing insight into our own behavior.

Today's living bird has largely disappeared from our urban lives, and the vast majority inhabits a shadowy archipelago of enormous poultry warehouses and slaughterhouses surrounded by fences and sealed off from the public. The modern chicken is both a technological triumph and a poster child for all that is sad and nightmarish about our industrial agriculture. The most engineered creature in history is also the world's most commonly mistreated animal. For better and worse, we have singled out the chicken as our meal ticket to the world's urban future while placing it mostly out of sight and mind.

The backyard chicken movement sweeping the United States and Europe is a response to city lives far removed from the daily realities of life and death on a farm, and the bird provides a cheap and handy way for us to reconnect with our vanishing rural heritage. This trend may not improve the life or death of the billions of industrial chickens, but it may revive our memories of an ancient, rich, and complex relationship that makes the chicken our most important companion. We might begin to look at chickens and, seeing them, treat them differently.

Even as we grow more distant from yet increasingly dependent on the fowl, our ways of describing courage and cowardice, tenacity and selflessness, and other human traits and emotions remain firmly bound up with the bird. "Everything forgets," said the literary critic George Steiner. "But not a language." We are cocky or we chicken out, henpecked or walking on eggshells. We hatch an idea, get our hackles up, rule the roost, brood, and crow. We are, in more ways than we might like to admit, a lot more like the chicken than the hawk or the dove or the eagle. We are, like the barnyard fowl, gentle and violent, calm and agitated, graceful and awkward, aspiring to fly but still bound to the earth.

Excerpted from Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler. Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Lawler. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.