Cautiously optimistic and more analytical and philosophical than downright practical, Reese’s work shows his deep concern...
Moral arguments for ending animal farming, including an instruction guide for those who want to take part in the movement.
Reese, the co-founder and research director of Sentience Institute, a nonprofit whose mission is to expand humanity’s moral circle to include farmed animals, believes that our food system can and should be changed. Animal farming, he writes, is a “moral catastrophe,” and he offers a road map for improving the food system as quickly and reliably as possible. The author sees the emphasis on individual diet change—such as by vegans and vegetarians—as a mistake, and he argues that the focus must be on institutional change, in which companies, social groups, and society at large are targeted. In his view, it is easier to inspire big food companies to switch their production to animal-free versions than to try to take down these billion-dollar corporations. Reese describes the moves recently taken by Whole Foods and other retailers to bring plant-based meat and dairy to market, and he also looks at the new technology of producing meat with cells grown outside an animal’s body. While acknowledging that technological progress can make such cultured meat cost-competitive, the author looks to social change rather than new technologies to bring about the end of animal farming. Consequently, subsequent chapters outline the key strategies that activists should adopt. He cautions against aggressive confrontational tactics, such as throwing fake blood, and urges using stories of individual victims of animal farming to arouse compassion and moral outrage. Near the end, he concludes, “if I had to speculate, I would say by 2100 all forms of farming will seem outdated and barbaric.”
Cautiously optimistic and more analytical and philosophical than downright practical, Reese’s work shows his deep concern for animals and makes clear why others should share it.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1945-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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