A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the diverse creatures of Earth.
The acclaimed moral philosopher advances a theory of justice that enables animals to lead empowered, safe, and dignified lives.
According to Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago and author of more than 20 books, humans and animals are moral equivalents and, as sentient beings, merit equal justice. This means substantial opportunities for choice and action in the areas of their lives that they value along with protection from injustices that wrongfully impede a flourishing existence. The latter is particularly critical given the cruelty, deprivation, and neglect that animals suffer. At the core of the argument is her previously developed Capabilities Approach, which valorizes a person’s (and, now, an individual animal’s) capacity to act and learn within enabling environments. She considers this theory superior to a “so like us” approach, which values animals for approximating human attributes such as speech but lacks “wonder at the diversity of nature [and] love of its many distinctive forms”; a utilitarianism that focuses on a calculus of pleasure and pain but ignores, for example, the sociability of animals; and a Kantian perspective that treats all creatures as ends rather than means while denying animals moral capacity. However, only beings that are intelligent, sentient, and striving (i.e., active in pursuing their goals) qualify for justice, hence omitting crustaceans, coral, and (maybe) bees. The robustness of Nussbaum’s approach becomes clear as she reflects on how we should think about animal death; “tragic dilemmas” that pit humans against animals, as in medical experimentation; companion animals; and animal-human friendships. Central to attaining animal justice are legal supports that confer rights on animals and give them standing in the courts. The author is particularly insightful on “four areas of moral unease: medical experimentation, meat eating, questions raised by the hunting practices of threatened traditional cultures, and, finally, larger and more general conflicts over space and resources.”
A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the diverse creatures of Earth.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982102-50-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
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.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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