This book is about solitary lives and an endangered species. Beagle knows his characters, and he knows the demands teaching can place on teachers. Both Gottesman and Sally Lowry give themselves over to educating college students. For Gottesman, teaching is a joyful exploration of subjects he loves, and he encourages debates in his class over the philosophers whose ideas animate his intellectual life. Lowry, on the other hand, sees her life as having been one of teaching useless information she loves to idiots. Both end up with adequate pensions and little else except for the wonderful talking rhinoceros. That teaching college can demand the whole of a teacher's life is often ignored when the subject of college education comes up, but Beagle remembers it in "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros."

The Indian Rhinoceros itself is near extinction, as is mentioned in "Professor Gottesman and the...