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 Near the end, he concludes, “if I had to speculate, I would say by 2100 all forms of farming will seem outdated and barbaric.”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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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