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Loading... Eating Animalsby Jonathan Safran Foer
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This is a fantastic book, detailing the author's personal journey through his decision making process about the choice to eat or not eat meat. He is thoughtful, articulate, and open minded. (  ) valerieweak | Feb 9, 2010 |  "We can't plead ignorance, only indifference." (p 252)I was really glad to read this book. Foer had a very similar road to vegetarinism and animal activism as my own. Of course, there are some differences in our path, but I appreciate the questions he explores that lead him to the realization that being a vegetarian of convenience is still a largely inhumane lifestyle. Eating Animals is not sensational, but rather we follow Foer on his own personal education process. I like that he examines the, at times, difficult dilemma of family ties to food and striving for a cruelty-free lifestyle. And I love that by the end he has comfortably integrated past cultural and familial traditions surrounding with his own commitment to meatless eating. I highly recommend this book to anyone, omnivore, vegan, or vegetarian, as it leaves room for you to explore your own thresholds and limits. The book still holds food in high regard and does not claim that eating is merely functional. It values the meaning that food and food production have historically held in our culture. I learned a lot that I did not know about industrial chicken and hog farming, pig and cow slaughter, the USDA, and terms like cage free. (Before I had access to Ruth's chickens' eggs, I had always felt good about buying eggs as long as they were from cage-free chickens. Now I would ask a few more questions about where those eggs came from.) I definitely learned a lot I did not know. (  ) lieslmayerson | Jan 31, 2010 | If you eat food, you should read this book. SleyTheDent | Jan 18, 2010 | I can't believe I'm only giving a JSF book four stars, since I am in love with him. However, I found this book a bit didactic in parts. He has obviously done his research and certainly made me think, but I finished it with more questions than answers. ( ) LShanna | Jan 11, 2010 | Wonderful for discussion purposes. Not forceful, but very informatiive with descriptions that will make you want to change your eating habits without forcing you too change. ( ) shandrajackson | Jan 2, 2010 | 
 "A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing," writes Foer, "but it's not what I've written here." Yet he has, though the implications of what eating animals really entails will be hard for most readers to swallow.  An earnest if clumsy chronicle of the author’s own evolving thinking about animals and vegetarianism, this uneven volume meanders all over the place, mixing reportage and research with stream-of-consciousness musings and asides. "Eating Animals” is a postmodern version of Peter Singer’s 1975 manifesto “Animal Liberation,” dressed up with narrative bells and whistles befitting the author of “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” What makes Eating Animals so unusual is vegetarian Foer's empathy for human meat eaters, his willingness to let both factory farmers and food reform activists speak for themselves, and his talent for using humor to sweeten a sour argument. Foer’s book is sometimes noble and powerful and brave—but it’s also deeply irritating, even to a fellow irritating vegetarian. Its polemic force is blunted by the signature JSF aesthetic: chapters tagged with cutesy titles (“All or Nothing or Something Else”), formal play to no obvious end (one section is written as a faux dictionary), and serious thought replaced by clumsy rhetorical jazz-hands (“When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere”). Whenever Foer approaches a controversial point, he retreats behind a wall of 3,000 rhetorical questions.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0316069906, Hardcover)Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-and the stories we now need to tell. (retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:14:01 -0500) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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