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OUR KINDRED CREATURES

Name: OUR KINDRED CREATURES
Author: Bill Wasik
ISBN: 9780525659068

HOW AMERICANS CAME TO FEEL THE WAY THEY DO ABOUT ANIMALS

by Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2024

A well-researched account that strikes a nice balance between description and analysis.

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The authors of Rabid return with an examination of the historical shift in attitudes of Americans toward animals.

Wasik, editorial director of the New York Times Magazine, and Murphy, a veterinarian, focus on the mid to late 1800s, when “America was collectively waking up to animal suffering….It was as if, in the span of little more than a decade, animals had gone from being seen as objects, mere things that humans were justified in treating however they might like, to being creatures whose joys and sufferings had to be taken into consideration.” However, this social movement did not occur without resistance. Horses carrying heavy loads down increasingly busy streets were frequently treated cruelly, dogfighting was a common form of entertainment, and live rabbits were used by medical schools for demonstrations. This era also saw the rapid decrease in the bison population as white settlers expanded into the frontier, and countless American birds were “being slaughtered wholesale for the cause of fashion.” Wasik and Murphy explore all of these topics compassionately. Central to the discussion is Henry Bergh, who founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866. The authors describe the “unexpected” and sometimes contentious relationship between Bergh and showman P.T. Barnum, and they report how the “grim, poorly ventilated” slaughterhouses in Chicago were initially met by the public with “a strange sort of fascination.” Wasik and Murphy share the contributions of other activists that “propelled the anti-cruelty cause forward,” including Philadelphian Caroline Earle White and Bostonian Emily Appleton, who were successful in establishing local chapters of the ASPCA, and George T. Angell, editor of Our Dumb Animals, an unusually named publication that ran for more than 80 years, advocating for their humane treatment.

A well-researched account that strikes a nice balance between description and analysis.

Pub Date: April 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780525659068

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
RABID
by Bill Wasik Monica Murphy

- BOOK REVIEW
AND THEN THERE’S THIS
by Bill Wasik

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2024

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

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A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.

In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.