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Loading... The Lives of Animals (1999)by J. M. Coetzee, Amy Gutmann (Editor)
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  zasmine | Dec 12, 2021 |   (My clear lack of disinterestedness...) Peter Singer's Peter Singer: "The value that is lost when something is emptied depends on what was there when it was full, and there is more to human existence than there is to bat existence." After all, humans can use human languages, plan for the future, manipulate complicated conceptual systems, in short, do the things that many humans do, and how could the existence of a being that can't do the things that many humans can be as valuable or rich as a human's? Responses by Wendy Doniger and Barbara Smuts (especially the latter) strike me as well-written... Costello's comparison between Ramanujan and Red Peter and Red Sally seems... well, unfortunate. (  ) slplst | May 26, 2021 | I loved it. 4.5/5 stars. The ending is simply fantastic. I'm also a vegetarian, and a Coetzee fanatic. So I'm biased. ( )1  weberam2 | Nov 24, 2017 | It’s mostly essays by other authors than the main author, referring back to Coetzee”s pieces: Amy Gutmann, Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts. Except for Singer’s, which is a fiction piece, they’re basically non-fiction pieces. The author’s portions are two fiction chapters/essays that make up one story. Short story? Novella? But not novel. They were written to be lectures. I’d say perhaps they’d be more interesting to listen to as lectures but I don’t think for me they would be any better than reading them as I did. I found most of the book dry and even boring at times, and definitely not what I’d expected. Philosophizing via a fiction piece could be interesting. Maybe I’d have found it interesting in the 1970s or 1980s when I was starting to think about animal rights issues. Now, I mostly found most of it irritating. I like thinking about these issues, and discussing them, but how they were presented in this book is not my style, and usually not my current way of thinking either. The writing is fine, and my amusement at the Singer piece and enjoyment of the Smuts piece, particularly when she is talking about her dog, make this book okay. So 2 stars it is. Now I’ll have to read other reviews (and hope that my book club members like it better than I did) because I swear this book had high average ratings. Once again, could it be me, in this space and time?? Perhaps. If I’d known what it was before I started it, I might have enjoyed it more. Luckily, it’s short, and while the print is small, the contents are not as dense as I’d feared. It’s a quick read, just not a particularly fun one for me. Someone who read my library copy at some point (the book is old enough that it still has the attached slip where they used to stamp due dates) must have read it for school because there is a lot of underlining throughout the book. Kind of annoying, kind of interesting to see what someone else found important. (  ) Lisa2013 | Sep 20, 2014 | )1 joucy | Feb 1, 2013 | no reviews | add a review
The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target. Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813Literature English (North America) American fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.61)
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I like the idea of a literary debate and all the commentaries are interesting. I particularly enjoyed the literary theorist Marjorie Garber's writing and of course Barbara Smuts' 'from the heart' experience of befriending animals. (