Storytelling: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals

Reviews
November 20, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 16 5 min read

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I became a vegetarian when I was 14 years old for a variety of reasons, not all of them necessarily admirable or based on ethics. I was concerned for animal welfare but vegetarianism was also an easier way of hiding my brief and painful eating disorder from my parents and friends, a way to assert my 14-year-old self into a particular brand of neo-hippie fashion, and a way to manufacture an identity at a time when I wanted to stand out and be heard. Also, somewhere deep down inside me, beneath the ornament and artifice, I truly felt that eating animals was wrong.

I returned to meat when I was in college, partially because vegetarianism had suddenly gone out of fashion, replaced with higher protein diets that emphasized the importance of meat, and partially as a means of overcoming my obsession with monitoring and controlling the amount of food I ate. I am more important than a chicken or a cow, I told myself and slowly but surely weaned myself back to enjoying the pleasure of food I had once forsaken. Relearning to eat meat, for me, was an exercise in self empowerment- not self empowerment the way that many books and TV shows in America advertise or market it as a product, but empowerment in the truest sense. This was about survival. If Darwin was right and only the fittest are meant to survive on this planet, then I was going to be the fittest. I relished the feeling of eating meat, of enjoying my place in the food chain (high up there). It was a good decision. I grew healthier and stronger, and I vowed to never look back. On Yom Kippur, whem my entire family was fasting, I refused. I didn’t want to fixate and focus on my eating, even in the name of God or self reflection. In my mind, this kind of reflection, of consideration for my body’s wants and needs, was sentimental and weak, a reflection of a struggle between and among myself, my belief system and the world at large, and I had emerged the victor.

coverIn Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer asks us to do just this kind of reflection. Many reviews of Eating Animals focus on the more practical concerns and issues that Foer raises about factory farming-how our farm animals are overcrowded, over medicated and sick and the implications of this for us, the people eating the animals. For Foer, these issues are important in that they reinforce the urgency with which we must recognize the horrors of factory farming, while showing us that there is nothing natural about the process of eating meat today at all.

While Foer’s patient and inventive way of chronicling the way eating factory-farmed meat impacts us is educational, there is nothing necessarily new about this knowledge that you couldn’t find in any number of mainstream books and magazines advocating a vegetarian lifestyle. It is also not his main argument. To Foer, our ideal method for reevaluating the way we view the food we eat is through the lens of compassion. At the start of his book, Foer insists that “A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing but that is not what I have written here.” and he is right. Eating Animals is, in many ways, a book about reflection and that means asking questions, rather than always providing answers.

The question that ultimately propels this book is whether or not in today’s world, eating meat is necessary and natural, and why we, as powerful and compassionate creatures, aware of suffering, continue to allow it. Foer acknowledges that there are many potential answers to this question, not all of which include vegetarianism. He admires the few (too few in fact) family farms, that still exist in the US, and leaves himself open to the possibility that a more humane manner of raising meat is possible. For someone who presents such a thorough and devastating account of the worst of human food production, Foer is an optimist. He believes that individual choices matter and that we have the power to make these choices daily. The decision to eat or not eat factory farmed meat (which is 99% of the meat available in supermarkets in the US today) is a moral one. He says, “It might sound naïve to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.”

It is precisely these kind of sentiments that make Eating Animals polarizing, and, in some ways controversial. The world is full of too many problems, some readers and critics say, and animals are not important enough to be first on the agenda for moral thought and reflection. But Foer is not asserting that we should abandon all other causes in the interest of adopting a lifestyle which includes humane treatment for animals, merely that we extend that kind of thought to them.

It is a reasonable argument, and it’s a wonder that many take personal offense to the suggestion that the way we are eating is wrong. In contrast to theorists like Peter Singer, who make the accusatory arguement that the way we treat animals is a form of “speciesism,” Foer provides, for readers who choose to contemplate these issues, a remarkably gentle assault of information. He agrees that the food we eat, including meat, is more than just sustenance, a concept he explores by explaining the way his Grandmother, a woman who survived Nazi Europe, obsesses about food. “Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love.”

Eating Animals is a sensitive and brave book and as such will always be met by certain criticisms reserved for things which are sensitive and brave. People will argue that the text is interesting, but naive and idealistic, which is true I think, only if you believe that most people are not sensitive and brave. Foer, however, is optimistic, urging the importance of stories themselves, but also, and more importantly, the retelling of stories, the tremendous power and privilege of being human, of reflecting on the past and being willing to change and make ourselves better people in the future.

Not everyone will share this type of introspection. Many of us haven’t spent periods of our life thinking about the food we eat, where it comes from and why we eat it and for those people, the effectiveness on this text will hinge on how effectively Foer is able to demonstrate the importance of thinking about the meat industry at all. For me, Eating Animals was an opportunity to re investigate two of my earliest convictions – the decision to stop eating meat and the decision to start again. Whatever I decide to do next will be entirely the same, and also an entirely different story.

is a writer living in Washington, DC, She received a BA in Philosophy and English Literature from Brandeis University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Her thesis was a collection of short stories and essays, entitled, Love and Hunger. She currently teaches writing at George Washington University and American University.

Reviews

A Field Guide to Silences: On Tracy K. Smith’s ‘Ordinary Light’

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July 21, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read
Drafted into teaching Sunday school, the whole congregation praying for her chastity, a younger Tracy K. Smith wrote “God is not that small” over and over, killing time (or something else) until class ended. A prayer asks; an invocation summons. This seems to have belonged to the second category of religious gesture: a ritual description, loosing God from the mean beliefs of prudes. Reproduced only once in her new memoir Ordinary Light, the words leave an impression of certainty armed by clarity. It also leaves ambiguous what Smith felt -- cool defiance? hot recrimination? -- while setting about this task, of inscribing a schoolhouse penance with rebel energies. God is not that small; emphasis hers. For all its elegance as a rejoinder, the sentence only draws a lower bound. Questions pour into the space left by negative definition: how large, then, is God? For that matter, what? Where does this presence fit into an adult life just starting to take shape? And God isn’t the only unknown: for x, substitute the soul, substitute death. At this point in her story, Smith has only the religion she’s grown out of -- a shelter built of prohibitions, watched by an omnipotent, father-shaped deity -- and the impulse to put pen to paper. Her searching stitches together the memories collected in Ordinary Light. It threads through the discrete, self-contained episodes of the first half -- she visits her grandmother in Alabama, hatches quail chicks, watches wide-eyed as a cousin traces “motherfuck” into the dust -- and binds them to the narrative of the second. As Smith leaves her Christian, Californian upbringing for university on the East Coast, her mother is diagnosed with cancer. Discovering literature, politics, sex, the college-aged Smith averts her eyes from the specter of impending tragedy; it swells; she and her siblings are called home for their goodbyes. “Sometimes,” Smith writes, “I tried to work it out in my head like a riddle: I am not a soul, but I possess one. When I die, I become what I possess.” The sneaky, oblique determinism of a logic game renders the form inadequate to loss -- but then, there’s poetry, the grace of which lies in its ability to hold difficult ideas in equipoise; it can keep a conundrum’s walls from collapsing. After her mother dies, she finds herself returning to Seamus Heaney’s “Clearances:” “I thought of walking round and round a space / Utterly empty, utterly a source.” She wonders aloud, “What did it mean to be both empty and a source? Was there something I housed or might one day house?” Smith teaches at Princeton; in these passages, she retraces her steps toward the center of the sonnet’s mysterious power, its resonance beyond reason. It’s a kind of reenactment for our benefit, and one of the book’s many gifts: she parses these lines such that we grow with her, as a reader. In those years, of course, she was also growing into the poet who would win a Pulitzer for Life on Mars, in part an elegy for her father, an engineer who worked for the air force, in 1980s Silicon Valley, and on the Hubble Telescope -- in an era when, as she describes it, “Technology was public.” From the central lyric dedicated to him, “The Speed of Belief,” the poems expand outward. They map their subjects -- outer space, God, current events -- as public, pop ideas, vintage postcards from the collective imagination. The opening poem, “The Weather in Space,” asks, “Is God being or pure force? The wind/ Or what commands it?” Later, “Cathedral Kitsch” gives the interrogative an ironic edge: “Does God love gold?/ Does He shine back/ at Himself from walls/ Like these, leafed/ In the earth’s softest wealth?” But the questions are no less real for being rhetorical. These poems say: leave the devil his details. God lives comfortably in line breaks and double-spacing, in enjambments, between if/ands, neither/nors -- even in, as “It & Co.” suggests, a failed shorthand: “How can It be anything but an idea,/ Something teetering on the spine/ Of the number i?” Smith concludes, “It is like some novels:/ Vast and unreadable.” Smith nominates Charlton Heston and Ziggy Stardust as emissaries of the beyond, and they descend, puckish and melancholy, as embodied spoofs of man’s need to view Creator as character. As it too becomes a meditation on the lapses in language, Ordinary Light takes up the other end of the telescope; its concerns are personal rather than public. Combing through her coming-of-age, Smith sorts the unexpressed from the inexpressible, the blank space on the page from the quiet across the dinner table. She assembles a field guide to silences and their keeping -- “an articulate variety of wordlessness” that avoids confrontation. The children sidestep topics that might expose political difference, and hide their romantic relationships and broken hearts. Their parents don’t admit to the seriousness of the disease. Craving reassurance, Smith never asks the most direct and difficult questions about how her mother feels. Only when she commits the reality to paper, writing “My mother is dying” in a letter petitioning the dean for permission to drop a literary theory course, does she accept it. It’s not surprising that Smith writes about how, after the funeral, she took shelter in those she calls her “necessary poets” -- but family and friends, her fellow bereaved, have a more immediate and urgent presence. Smith fights with her father, and confides in her sister, Jean; she walks with old friends, other motherless women, and together they try to articulate their hopes about heaven. We get only glimpses of these moments -- the exact exchanges either have been lost, or are deliberately obscured. Instead, she charts the wake left by the words. She seems most interested in talk: a genre without form or discipline, that can match the mess of grief. Through sentences slung and stuttered, forced to double back and revise, people give and receive solace. She admits: “I’d never spoken so freely or honestly with my mother.” That she never engaged with her mother about religion, never sounded out the dimensions of her changing faith together, is one of Smith’s enduring regrets. As with her read of the Heaney’s sonnet, each of her religious queries, taken alone, seems deceptively straightforward: “Is God each of the many different things we seek in the course of a life?” Smith asks. “Does God become an armament we leverage for the ones we love, the ones we have committed to nurture and protect?” These questions, when laid out in prose, have none of the irradiated rigor of the poems in Life on Mars. They give way to each other effortlessly; there’s always room for one more. Poetry might be depthless; prose’s gift, it turns out, lies in plentitude, in creating a sense of ampleness. With Ordinary Light, Smith has written a book that speaks into past silence, one in which language is more than careful; it’s a form of caretaking.
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Reviews

Uncle Bob’s Van: A Review of Robert Stone’s Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

Reviews
February 10, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read
My father used to tell the story of the summer he spent touring Europe with his Uncle John. For five memorable weeks, he was allowed (or forced, depending on his mood) to ride shotgun in a decrepit VW bus, barnstorming the battlefields of World War II, listening to John - an uncle by marriage, practically a stranger - spin tales as tall as the day was long... never once stopping to pee. Last week, as I raced through Robert Stone's new memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, I found myself recalling the tone with which my dad described that Continental adventure, a kind of affectionate exasperation, or exasperated affection. Revisiting mid-century America in Robert Stone's company, it turns out, is a lot like traveling with a garrulous uncle. One is not always certain one's getting the straight dope, nor is the telling without its longeurs. But one would hate not to have made the trip.Stone himself returns repeatedly to questions of veracity, and declares himself to be after bigger fish than "just the facts":So much can be said about the intersections of life and language, the degree to which language can be made to serve the truth. By the truth I mean unresisted insight, which is what gets us by, which makes one person's life and sufferings comprehensible to another. We take an experience, or a character, an event, and so to speak we write a poem about it.The deepest insights in Prime Green harmonize the sensory impressions of how the world felt then to young Bob Stone, with the hard-won skepticism of a writer many years his senior. In chapters on Ken Kesey and Vietnam and helter-skelter Los Angeles, Stone probes the self-delusions and selfishness that underwrote the Sixties counterculture, while doing honor to its outsized personalities and nobler aspirations.The story starts not in the Sixties proper, but in 1958, aboard a naval transport ship traversing the globe. We see Robert Stone, fresh out of high school, exploring the shore and dreaming away the days at sea. The beauty of the ocean and its creatures would seem to bespeak the essential benevolence of nature, but racism in South Africa and a bombing campaign in Egypt trumpet the human capacity for ugliness. (Both the Rousseauvian and the Hobbesian notes will crescendo in the decade to come.) Back home in New York, Stone gets married and tries to write. After a stint in New Orleans, he moves to California as a Stegner fellow at Stanford, falls in with a band of proto-hippies led by Ken Kesey, and thus launches headlong into the turbulent waters of the Sixties.Writing about Kesey, Stone is at his best. The half of Prime Green that deals with Kesey could have been expanded and published on its own, under a separate title - Remembering the Chief. As it is, Stone's account provides a compassionate complement to Tom Wolfe's depiction of the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Stone's love for Kesey is evident, yet a kind of fraternal competitiveness allows him to see the man behind the persona more fully than did Wolfe. We feel the powerful allure of Kesey's charisma, without which the Sixties of pop-cultural memory might not have come into being - the "psychedelic movement," the Grateful Dead, the road to Woodstock. But we also see glimmers of fascism and paranoia around the edges of Kesey's ubermensch antinomianism... the beginning of the road to Altamont. More importantly, we come to understand the long silence that followed Kesey's early burst of literary brilliance.Stone himself suffered no such silence - after winning the National Book Award for his first novel, AHall of Mirrors, he published six others, as well as a book of short stories. (Larry McMurtry was also part of the prodigious group of Stegner fellows from the early 60s). In his seventh decade, Stone can still hammer out sentences of marvelous felicity and a kind of raffish charm. Moreover, focusing on his late friend and colleague Kesey frees Stone from the burden of writing about himself, which tends to nudge the aforementioned felicity toward glibness. The deceits and adulterous episodes that have marked his remarkable forty-five year marriage, for example, are mentioned almost in passing, tossed off as jokes. And the dark side of the author's hard drug use, like that of free love, is everywhere alluded to but nowhere dramatized. "We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us." End chapter. (More please! one thinks.)Apart from the long middle section that lingers on Kesey, Stone is most affecting when exploring his own failures of nerve and/or judgment. In early passages on South Africa and Jim-Crow New Orleans, he laments his own inability to take a public stand against apartheid, and thus illuminates the degree to which institutional racism depends on the silence and complicity of forward-thinking people. A queasy interlude in L.A. finds parents and their small children sharing balloons of nitrous oxide.When, would you believe, this one little tyke made this snarky face right at me and said ha ha or hee hee or some shit, 'These aren't balloons! They're condoms!' [...] We'd been getting loaded watching small innocent children sucking gas from condoms.An uproarious chapter recounts Stone's stint writing for a tabloid called "the National Thunder. It was an imitation of the National Enquirer, lacking the delicacy and taste of the original." And a late section on Vietnam, in which Stone excoriates himself for being a tourist in other people's combat zone, hammers home the horrific senselessness of that war. (I regret to say that I've never read anything else by Robert Stone, but I plan to start with Dog Soldiers this summer.)While providing a showcase for these bravura episodes, Prime Green remains somewhat ramshackle as a memoir. This may befit the anarchic, unfocused nature of the Sixties themselves, but it also speaks to an unsettling trend in the burgeoning confessional market: the memoir-as-article-collection. As with Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone, substantial chunks of Prime Green were first serialized in magazine form; to make them cohere into a sustained narrative requires a degree of readerly imagination, a filling in of holes.Read Prime Green as a kind of compilation album, however - a sampler of Robert Stone's range - and a quite different and more satisfying book emerges. In the course of 230 quick pages, we meet Ram Dass and Alger Hiss, undertake adventures in sex, drugs, war, and parenting, and encounter "unresisted insight" and wry humor in almost every paragraph. It's like riding shotgun with Uncle John, except the trip moves faster, and touches down on five continents, and we can climb off this bus whenever we like. Buses, come to think of it, play a special role here. In Robert Stone's nimble hands, Kesey's "Furthur" becomes a metaphor for the Sixties themselves. Whether one was on the bus or off the bus back then, whether or not one had yet been born, one now lives, for better or for worse, in the landscape the counterculture transformed. It was, as Stone puts it, "...a journey of such holiness that being there - mere vulgar location - was instantly beside the point. From the moment the first demented teenager waved a naked farewell as Neal Cassady threw the clutch, everything entered the numinous."
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16 comments:

  3. I think you are wrong on that, D. It is a premise most people are vehemently in disagreement with, and the investigative work Foer did, getting into those factories was very dangerous, and nobody, except, perhaps, PETA, bothers to do investigative journalism like that anymore. I believe those things are what makes the writing of this book brave. Although, some of that bravery is muted by the fact that Foer does not take a hard line stand in favour of vegetarianism, but I think that is because he knows that there are too many people in complete blind denial about the suffering of the animals we eat.

  4. I guess I’m having a hard time believing being a vegetarian in park slope in 2009 is in any way comparable to blacks risking their life and limbs to protest segregation in the 50s deep south. In fact, that seems pretty insulting to me.

    Being vegetarian is fine, but it is not brave. You are not risking anything except some snide comments from your friends now and then, but lord knows you’ll be making as many back at them.

  5. Thanks for your comments, D.

    To clarify, I don’t think that Foer’s book is brave because I agree with it or because I think there is something intrinsically brave about being a vegetarian. To me, Foer’s book is brave because it is highlighting an issue that many people don’t care about or else tend to minimize. Foer is not afraid to face that kind of criticism and I find that kind of commitment to his ideals brave,

    Foer’s quote regarding protesting segregation highlights the way in which every generation tends to be a bit myopic. His argument is that what was seen as a radical act then is now perceived as an ultimate act of justice. He contends that refusing to support factory farming is now perceived as radical, but is actually the right and moral thing to do.

  6. It seems to me that Foer’s book is brave precisely because it has to contend with attitudes like D’s.

  7. Arielle,

    Thanks for your response. I have a lot I’d argue with you, but I might as well save it for my own review (one where I will certainly get negative comments on the internet for and perhaps that will make me brave, eh cooper?). But I would like to address this:

    “It might sound naïve to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.”

    The above, to me, is totally representative of the smug and intellectually shallow thinking Foer displays in the book. What happened was not people sitting in different seats in a restaurant. What happened was masses of oppressed people risked life and limb to break laws they thought were unjust. It would not have sounded fantastic at all to tell someone in the 1950s, “Oh, can you believe that massive civil unrest might change our laws about race?”

    There is no risk of life or limb to buy a Boca burger. There are no laws being broken. There is simply no comparison. One might as well say “It would have sounded crazy in 1930 to say that a few Americans visiting a beach in Europe would end WWII.”

    Foer is not trying to make an intellectual point there (I hope at least), he is only making an emotional one. A dishonest emotional point I would argue, which again seems representative of the book as I read it.

  8. D.,

    I think we are actually agreeing on Foer’s intent. We just disagree on whether it is a good move or not. As I state in my review, I believe that Foer is ultimately making an emotional argument, one which will alienate some readers, and one which I am personally open to, since I feel like I have an emotional stake at investigating these issues.

    This doesn’t mean I agree with everything Foer advocates; it means I considered this book to be an important and thought provoking read. I don’t consider the personal experience to be antithetical to intellectual honesty- in fact, the whole point of Foer’s inclusion of the personal is to demonstrate the way in which our own experience filters our moral choices.

    I chose that specific quote from Eating Animals because I felt it was polarizing and would probably alienate some readers. I think that’s a deliberate choice on Foer’s part- he is trying to ignite some kind of reaction. I still think that Foer’s main point, in making this analogy, is not to equate animal rights with civil rights, but to compare the tendency of people to think that individual choices don’t matter. During the 1950s there were many people who believed that Civil Rights would never happen…in fact, there are people today who say we still have a heck of a lot to accomplish. I don’t think these are equal issues, but I do think it is an apt analogy. Some people today think that food choices won’t ever be enough to overturn factory farming just as some people in the 1950s did not think that civil disobedience would be enough to end segregation. In hindsight, it is easy to say, “Of course- civil rights naturally happened!” At that time, I don’t think the impact was necessarily clear.

    As far as snobbery goes- I simply did not feel that Foer’s argument has class connotations. Yes, certain types of vegetarian food are more expensive, but lots of vegetarian meals are incredibly cheap and just as healthy. The reason people aren’t running out to eat rice and beans in the US and many other places is cultural. Much of the world enjoys a vegetarian diet. Foer’s claims are not unique to young bourgeoisie hipsters living in New York. Philosophers have been debating the ethical implications of eating meat- how we raise animals, how we kill them, etc….for centuries, all over the world. I think bringing up these issues is valid and important.

  9. Much of the world “enjoys” a vegetarian diet because they cannot afford meat. Meat consumption has been rising dramatically across the globe as meat has become cheaper and more available globally. To say it is merely cultural differences does not seem accurate to me. There is a factory farmer who brings up this point in the book. I think if you want a brave confrontation with the issues of factory farming, which are many and serious, you absolutely must confront the class issues. You can say that it is possible to eat rice and beans and be healthy, but food is not merely energy and that is not what people want to eat and that is why the rich hipster vegetarians spend lots of money on expensive vegan products and meat substitutes.

    Foer’s arguments really do result in a world where the rich can enjoy the pleasures of meat and animal product consumption through family-farm products while the poor are denied yet another pleasure.

    I think this is fine if you want to make that argument, I like bold arguments. But I believe you must actually make it, not simply avoid the entire issue of class.

  10. Hi again, D.

    Forgive me, but I actually grew up eating rice and beans. My mother is from Cuba and I always saw rice and beans as comfort food. It is cultural.

    Your argument is actually supporting mine. Vegetarian food is cheaper than meat. The fact that meat is considered superior to vegetarian cuisine is entirely cultural. There are people in the world who would never eat pork or beef or other types of meat because it goes against their religious beliefs- and you know what? These cultures have great cuisines too.

    Culture can change. More people the world over could be fed if we all adopted a vegetarian diet. Additionally, Foer doesn’t agree that anyone should have the right to the “pleasures” of meat, when that pleasure comes at the expense of ethically raised animals.

    If you don’t want to change your diet because you don’t deem this issue important enough to merit attention, that’s fine. but it’s not necessarily a class issue as you make it out to be. It’s a cultural issue and a matter of taste.

  11. D.

    Seems to me like you’re just being belligerent here. Arielle is simply recounting her experiences as a vegetarian, while examining Foer’s take on the issues pertinent to eating (and enjoying) meat. Actually, given your wholesale rejection of a particular lifestyle, you remind me of those holier-than-thou Park-Slope vegetarians you seem to despise. We can critique other people’s personal choices all we want, but at the end of the day, these kinds of personal choices rarely effect us. What we have here is a thoughtful consideration of a particular kind of lifestyle, no more, no less. Your real beef (pun intended) is with Foer, not the reviewer, so I’d suggest you find a way to contact him.

  12. Bravery, like many things, depends on context. I can not understand how being a vegetarian in Park Slope (or advocating vegetarianism from there) can be called brave. I mean, what is he risking? Is he going to receive death threats by some shady cattle owner’s organization?
    The really irritating thing about Safran Foer is his lack of humility, his profound self-righteousness. Two things that are quite common these days and have nothing to do with being brave.

  13. Beatrix

    My opening comment was probably too harsh, so I apologize for that. For whatever it is worth I do not reject the lifestyle of vegetarianism, whatever that would mean. I have plenty of respect for vegetarians. What I don’t have respect for is unfounded self-righteousness, poor logic and dishonest arguments. It annoys me whether it is Jonathan Safran Foer in this book or your average meat-eater who comes into this debate just to brag about how great fried chicken tastes. I’m rejecting the arguments, not the lifestyle.

  14. Pingback: Book Review: Why SuperFreakonomics has the answers for Eating Animals « Dusty Hum
  15. Pingback: The Millions : All Creatures Great and Small: On Animals in Literature | A Literature Blog

  16. This D person, I am thinking has some interest in the meat industry.

    His arguments about false logic are themselves inaccurate and nonsensical.

    The comparison to previous social revolutions is a valid on in that there are also millions of lives on the line here and people are breaking laws and dedicating their lives to perform investigations and work undercover for years. Its easy to speak against animals when they do not have a voice. It’s up to humanity to give them one.

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A Final Journey: A Review of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus

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July 14, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read
Published posthumously, Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus is very self consciously a final book. In it Kapuscinski reflects on his life as a writer, rarely delving much into the details of his travels with which his readers have become familiar, but instead dwelling more upon writing itself. But more so, his focus is on Herodotus, the historian from ancient Greece, who Kapuscinski counts as a great historian and whose books were a near constant companion of Kapuscinski's on his travels.Indeed Travels more than anything else reads like a companion text to Herodotus' book The Histories - a footnote early on refers readers to the Oxford University Press edition for those who want to follow along at home.And that may be a good idea because, for the most part, Travels is Herodotus seen through Kapuscinski's lens. He tells us that the book was given to him by an editor before his first journey abroad and he took it with him on nearly all of his assignments during his long career. In looking at Herodotus, Kapuscinski suggests to the reader the origins of journalism as well as its purpose while also marveling at the fantastical stories and bizarre cultures described by the Greek. Kapuscinski is a true fan.But this book is also a memoir of sorts, and Kapuscinski parcels out little nuggets of the Kapuscinski philosophy, a way of looking at the world that will be familiar to his readers.Describing his very first trip, to India, Kapuscinski describes devouring books about the country and about the power of the written word to transport and teach:With each new title I read, I felt as if I were taking a new journey to India, recalling places I had visited and discovering new depths and aspects, fresh meanings, of things which earlier I had assumed I knew. These journeys were much more multidimensional than my original one. I discovered also that these expeditions could be further prolonged, repeated, augmented by reading more books, studying maps, looking at paintings and photographs. What is more, they had a certain advantage over the actual trip - in an iconographic journey such as this one, one could stop at any point, calmly observe, rewind to the previous image, etc., something for which on a real journey there is neither the time nor the chance.And of course, I'm sure there are many readers, like myself, for whom Kapuscinski's books have had "a certain advantage over the actual trip." With Kapuscinski as a guide, his books offer more of an escape and more excitement than most of us can hope for from our planned excursions to non-threatening locales.In Herodotus, Kapuscinski undoubtedly sees his foundation, without whom Kapuscinski and many other journalists, historians, and travel writers wouldn't be possible. As Kapuscinski shows us, the world of the Greek nearly 2,500 years ago isn't all that far removed from what Kapuscinski has spent his career doing. At the same time, we wouldn't consider Herodotus a journalist in the modern sense, one who is beholden to proper sourcing, fact checking, and objectivity. Herodotus gathered up tales of mysterious faraway lands, relating even the ones that sound far-fetched, crafted narratives to suit his efforts, and passed judgment when it struck him to do so. Following his death, Kapuscinski was accused of just such things by Jack Shafer at Slate. Defending Kapuscinski, I wrote "To define [Kapuscinski's] books as journalism (or memoir, or "truth") exclusively does a disservice to journalism - offering a context within which this work fits, or even a disclaimer, is more appropriate - but to suggest that there isn't a place for writing and books like these does a disservice to readers." In speculating about Herodotus' way of life, Kapuscinski defends the writer's right to embellish in the service of both making a living and entertaining readers (two goals that often go hand in hand)It is possible... that the rhythm of Herodotus's life and work was as follows: he made a long journey, and upon his return traveled to various Greek cities and organized something akin to literary evenings, in the course of which he recounted the experiences, impressions, and observations he had gathered during his peregrinations. It is entirely likely that he made his living from such gatherings, and that he also financed his subsequent trips in this way, and so it was important to him to have the largest auditorium possible, to draw a crowd. It would be to his advantage, therefore, to begin with something that would rivet attention, arouse curiosity - something a tad sensational. Story plots meant to move, amaze, astonish, pop up throughout his entire opus; without such stimuli, his audience would have dispersed early, bored, leaving him with an empty purse.Perhaps it was a similar motivation that pushed Kapuscinski to not just send back terse wire service missives on the conflicts and battles he observed but also to keep a separate notebook of observations that he would craft into his books. But to suggest that Kapsucinski's motives were craven and profit-driven alone would be to ignore the profound empathy with which he treats his subjects and the care with which he observes the foreign lands he visits.In Travels, Kapuscinski describes being lured to Algiers in 1965 by a vague tip from a source. Upon his arrival he discovers that indeed a coup has occurred, but he is dismayed to find that it has been bloodless and so there are no scenes of battle and mayhem to describe to hungry readers back home. Then Kapuscinski realizes how misguided this attitude is:It was here in Algiers, several years after I had begun working as a reporter, that it slowly began to dawn on me that I had set myself on an erroneous path back then. Until that awakening, I had been searching for spectacular imagery, laboring under the illusion that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of responsibility to understand the events at hand. It was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions, when it is rocked by shots and explosions, engulfed in flames and smoke, choked in dust and the stench of burning, when everything collapses into rubble on which people sit despairing over the remains of their loved ones.If there is a philosophy that encapsulates Kapuscinski, that is it. Body counts and "colorful" descriptions of chaos and violence offer us no insight into our world. Only with time and effort come empathy and understanding. This holds true of all of our best journalism (cf. George Packer).But Kapuscinski does not romanticize this noble cause. He instead sees it as a symptom of his loneliness. He is not the swashbuckling hero journalist that some portray him as but a wandering lost soul imprisoned by his travels. Near the end of this odd little memoir, travelogue, and homage to Herodotus, Kapuscinski, as if knowing that this is his goodbye, lays himself bare to his readers:Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy - lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others, and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kinship and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday's most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance.For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial.Kapuscinski's admission is stark and sad, but one must think that it was his lack of joy, of hubris, of a sense of heroism that underpinned the singular tone of his work and made it such a revelation to read.See Also: The Reporter: Ryszard Kapuscinski
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The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: April 2006

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April 2, 2006 | 1 book mentioned 3 min read
I had a hell of a time picking my book of the month this time around. This happens every few months, and I'm always better off for the difficulty in choosing my favorite. One month I will go through four books and have a definitive favorite - a book that I'll recommend to friends, etc. The next, however, I'll manage to read three books that are not only better than the one I picked the month before, but are good enough to make my preliminary "best of the year" short list. It never fails - I'd have more balance in my life if I had read them a month apart, but it never happens that way.This month my choice was between Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer), Hard Laughter (Anne Lamott), and Other Electricities (Ander Monson). Hard Laughter was good - better than I had expected it would be - but it was the easiest one to leave off. Many months it would have been my favorite (I'm a sucker for books that are 80% conversation) but this month it had too much to compete against.Foer and Monson fought it out in my mind until I realized something - I've already picked Foer as a Book of the Month - my first one, for The Unabridged Pocketbook of Lightning. So, by process of elimination, Ander Monson won the right to have his book selected.I first heard of Ander Monson through the LitBlog Co-Op's "Read These Books or Die" Winter 2005/6 campaign and was extremely interested in its use of indexes. I was intrigued enough to request it from our local library, and to my surprise they purchased a copy and put my name at the top of the list.Mr. Monson, you can send me a thank you anytime.Really, Other Electricities is like no other book I've ever read. It's not quite a novel, but it's also not quite a short story collection. It's somewhere in between - a group of essays and short stories that all interplay with each other; all create another piece of a grand novel. It's a series that is bound by one theme - the lives of a small town shortly before and shortly after the death of a girl. Her accident - she and her prom date were drowned in a frozen lake after they attempted to drive on it - binds every character together to the point where each story, regardless of the protagonist, is ultimately connected.The resemblances to Fargo and Twin Peaks are evident. And while Other Electricities may not have been inspired by Laura Palmer and Marge Gunderson, there are a lot of similarities in their worlds. In fact, the episodic nature of Monson's overall story cries out for the comparisons. Much like Twin Peaks was a collection of odd characters whose lives intertwined; each of these stories overlaps and peeks into the life of this town in the years leading up to and following the death. The setting is Coen Brothers, but the town could have been created by David Lynch.Don't think that this is a simple knock-off, though. Monson creates a complex town that's filled with failed dreams and eccentric people - the group of bored and rutted kids that nearly always drinks too much, gets themselves stuck in the middle of a frozen lake, and commits murder. It's cold, and the town has adapted to it. There's mystery in the air, not to mention a vast array of disappointment.The variety in the style and length of each story in Other Electricities helps create a mosaic of voices and lifestyles; each character brings a new revelation about their small town, about death, and about growing up as a teenager in the middle of domestic tundra. Everyone gets their say.The layout of the book is wonderful. Monson charts out every character and connects each in a web, then gives an explanation of the themes and characters - both artistically and satirically. An index not only helps reference common ideas but also gives a little insight into the relationship between Liz, the drowned girl, and her prom date - a relationship that isn't mentioned directly. You can cross reference to your heart's content.It's amazing to think of these stories on their own - they're all very good, but as a whole there are ideas and themes that aren't even mentioned; are simply implied by the connections between stories. I've never felt so cold, and I've never desired to go wandering through a small town, around a lake, and into the city center during a vicious snowstorm as much as I did after reading Other Electricities.Well, it's snowing outside. I guess I could start now.-Corey VilhauerBlack Marks on Wood PulpCVBoMC Jan, Feb, Mar.
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Fighting Words: Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History

Reviews Sport
April 30, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 1 3 min read
To its critics, boxing is as persistent and as worrisome a social phenomenon as prostitution; and indeed, being a very direct way for poor young men to make use of their bodies, it is a kind of masculine cognate for the female sex trade. The more sympathetic view is that boxing is ugly but necessary.
Reviews Sport
| 1 book mentioned 1 3 min read
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