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Björn Kurtén seems to have had an obsession with the cave bear, flourishing in the Ice Age but long extinct. This account of its life and times, The Cave Bear Story (Columbia University Press, $11.95, ISBN 0 231 10361 1) is an enthusiastic work, whose author’s interest was fired by meeting a mass of fossil remains of the largest bear to exist. From them he reconstructs the animal, its character and its precarious existence. Cave bear cults are known and have an echo in the more familiar brown or teddy bear devotees.