The PhD application and grading marathon is winding down, and I’ve been remiss in posting recently–so here are some of the upcoming events that will be on my radar in the Spring.
Call for Papers and/or Abstracts
Minding Animals – Utrecht, 4-6 July 2012. Abstracts open until Jan. 15. I’ll probably be traveling with family in Spain during this conference, but it looks interesting, especially to the critically minded animal studies folks (as in, it’s sponsored in part by the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, and as such is less welfarist in scope than, well, me.)
-Also due Jan 15 are abstracts for general-audience-ish papers on Planet of the Apes and philosophy. Cool…if only our separation-anxiety beagle would let me and my wife out to see movies in the theater, I wouldn’t have to wait for Netflix on this one.
-NYU is having a Conference on the Moral Brain from Mar. 30-Apr. 1. that looks super-interesting. Registration is free but full; I’m on the waitlist, and am kicking myself for not signing up when I first heard about it.
-The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s “The Nonhuman Turn in the 21st Century” looks broad-ranging and fascinating, and it will be running from May 3-5. Technically the call for abstracts is still open until Monday, but I don’t have enough expertise in any of the mentioned topics to submit anything. I’d love to go, if I can swing it, though.
[edit] This upcoming University of Tennessee symposium, “Animals, Ethics, and Law” also looks really good. I’d be especially interested in hearing Clare Palmer’s talk on the scope of our ethical obligations to wild animals. Hopefully I can make the longish trip down there after class on March 2-3.
And now for something completely different: “I hate balls”. Lots of fascinating gender politics going on here. Huh. . .And this PBS video, “My Life as a Turkey”, is pretty great. Enjoy.
Oh, and this is Rodney, who we adopted as a retired research dog – he’s got the tat, neuroses, and sweetness to prove it.
This interview with UChicago’s Robert Pippin got me to thinking about the effects of seeing the world through oppression-tinted lenses, especially after rereading (for class) Jeff McMahan’s recent piece (from which the image above is lifted) on the desirability of mass predator eradication. Setting aside the fascinating discussions on Hegel, art, and modernity, I want to narrow in on how Marx famously ‘turned Hegel on his head’, and the effects of viewing the world through zero-sum oppressionscopes. Viewed in such a light, various complex symbioses can immediately be reduced to hierarchical power differentials of oppressors and oppressed. But is this accurate, and would ‘liberation’ lead to a better world? I’m going to have to equivocate: sometimes symbiosis is indeed mere parasitism, but sometimes it’s commensalism and sometimes it’s mutualism. We want to shoot for mutualism. (Duh.)
(Full disclosure: I’m a graduate of Wesleyan University, and although my major–the ‘dead white men’ College of Letters–set me on its own course, the PCU-ness of many of my classes left an undeniable mark. Personally, I loved being able to study a core of ‘great books’ while being challenged by a range of broadly ‘left’ disciplines in my coursework. While my gripe at the time was more with what I perceived as the nihilist tendencies of postmodernism (we’ve since come to terms, albeit cautiously), the idea that hierarchy and inequality were categorically unjust seemed an unquestioned axiom of many of my peers.)
I’ll start by saying that some forms of human-animal relations are, indeed, pretty overtly zero-sum in this respect. Battery cage egg production comes to mind, as this blog post rejecting incrementalism points out, but this is as much because of the economics of “commodity” production in an age of economic globalization as because of anything inherently wrong with animal husbandry. (There’s a whole literature rejecting ‘humane livestock’ and what Francione terms ‘new welfarism’, and others neocarnism, that would reject animal agriculture as inherent parasitical. I don’t want to get in to that argument right now, other than to say that I think it’s logically coherent–indeed, with the exception of some nutritionally vulnerable groups, we’re not obligate omnivores–but ignorant of “the way the world actually is”. In other words, yes, I’m an incrementalist.)
Maybe it’s because I’m a Rortyan pragmatist who cringes when I hear single-premise constructs about ethics and policy (hence the contradictory ‘myopic clarity’ schtick). Especially in the case of food politics, I don’t see the other 98% of the world agreeing with the vegan ethic’s principle of harm avoidance overriding all of our other distinct moral premises anytime soon.
Maybe I’m cynical, but I’m cynical in the sense that nobody, not even the most dedicated vegan, is truly “cruelty-free”, especially those of us urbanites who live under what Marx accurately termed alienation from the means of production. This even follows from the second law of thermodynamics and the nature of ecological pyramids: in order for us to live, other living matter must die. This is true for any organism that is not an autotroph…so until we start figuring out how to photosynthesize or chemosynthesize, we have to remove energy from the world to live. So yes, we should all endeavor to eat and live lower down on the resource/food web. But these kinds of ethical concerns are distinct from harm/care/suffering, and they need to be balanced against each other.
And I don’t say this as a cheap rhetorical tactic (to merely prop up counterarguments as if they somehow changed the reality in question: see the Dawkins elevatorgate (just Google it) for a primer on how not to say “your issue is unimportant because other important issues exist.” Which often descends into the caricature: “Why care about animals? Kids are starving in Africa!”)
I guess all I’m saying is that I think we live in a tragically configured moral universe (as Sandel said of Isaiah Berlin’s views), and while I’m not a conservative, I have a lot of respect for the Burkean idea that social engineering projects don’t take you where you think you want to go (cue the ecological nightmare that would be mass predator eradication). Then again, if I see compelling evidence that we can restructure the global food system–or global predator-prey interactions–to bring about a broadly sustainable vegan future, I’m down. I mean, if the Vulcans do it…But large-scale veganic agriculture without massive synthetic fertilizer use (and resultant dead zones) and backbreaking stoop labor is not on the near-term horizon. (This also gets us into a whole other debate: the Vandana Shiva small-scale future versus the Economist techno-sustainable large-scale future. Again, I don’t want to go there right now.)
That said, I think the rich world needs to start eating about 90% less meat and dairy, and I think serious policy efforts need to be made to keep the rapidly developing world–especially China–from following in our dietary footsteps. But things aren’t looking good. But just looking at all animal husbandry as equally illegitimate is to paint with a comically wide brush. But I guess that’s why I’m a welfarist. (It’s also because I don’t believe that rights–whether human or animal–are anything other than a(n enormously useful) social construct)…but that’s a topic for another post.)
It’s a stretch to say that the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, but, sadly, Yeats was on to something.
“Why does Hollywood make animals act like humans? As The Atlantic’s James Parker has pointed out, the answers lie in philosophy. The French film critic André Bazin wrote of our relationship to onscreen animals as an “ontological otherness”—a connection with an outside world that reminds us of ourselves—or what’s also been called the “human gaze” by animal ethicist Randy Malamud. We’ve become accustomed to seeing “animals doing silly things for the audience’s amusement—things they don’t usually do, and have no reason to do,” Malamud argues. When we see Free Willy’s whale flip through the sky, it’s not for his entertainment so much as ours. The same is true of a cute YouTube video of a hamster eating broccoli or a LOLcat pleading for a cheeseburger, an amusingly discomfiting image. It’s also funny to see Zookeeper’s animals talking on a cell phone—or, at least, it’s supposed to be.” (from this article, on Zookeeper, Project Nim, and animal symbolism)
John Berger pointed out in “Why Look At Animals” that the pervasiveness of nonhuman animal symbolism inversely correlates to the presence of actual nonhuman animals in our lives. I haven’t seen Zookeeper, and, given the controversy surrounding the treatment of its captive animals and the mediocre-at-best Kevin James, I don’t really plan to. (Project Nim, on the other hand, I look forward to.) But this caustic article posted on Minding the Campus (a generally conservative counterpoint to the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm — or at least that’s how I parse it) got me to thinking.
Mary Grabar’s “Literature Professors Discover Animals” ranges from Foucault to the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) to Steve Best to posthumanism (as against transhumanism – see this post at IEET for the distinction). The audience, apparently, is supposed to know why such studies are “ominous”, because she never explains her position. She is also lumping together two related but distinct things–posthumanism and critical animal studies–about which I have two different opinions.
As this muddled and contested Wikipedia page indicates, the term posthumanism (like the field of animal studies) means different things to different people. I’m ambivalent about the term, but I still can’t accept the bald anthropocentrism of humanism, much of which I otherwise agree with.
Critical animal studies, on the other hand, tends to specifically embrace the post-Marx continental philosophy in which all of reality can be viewed as a hierarchical power struggle of otherness, alterity, exploitation, and domination. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but I’ve been to both CAS conferences and to the HSUS’ TAFA, and the two are very different in scope and sensibility. One is broadly welfarist, the other abolitionist. At this stage in the social movement for animals, I think we need both movements, just as we need both PETA and the ASPCA, ADI and IFAW. The two are, indeed, distinct, sometimes even mutually hostile (which is unfortunate, but not surprising).
My reaction to Grabar’s piece, then, is threefold: 1) she lumps a range of different material under the same header, leading the reader to assume that all academic work in animal studies is Foucauldian, etc.; 2) she presumes her argument to be so obvious that it doesn’t need mentioning (why, exactly, is this an ‘ominous’ development, and what’s so great about the existing Judeo-Xian ethic?), which it isn’t, and it does; and 3) the result is that this ends up resembling an ‘ivory tower hit job’ in which posthumanism becomes anti-human, which it needn’t be, and where animal studies becomes, falsely, nothing more than CAS.
My wife and I took a road trip to Ontario last weekend (a 16-hour round trip!) so I could check out the Thinking About Animals conference, put on by Brock University’s sociology department and the Institute for Critical Animal Studies. I felt a bit like a welfarist fish in an abolitionist pond, but it was great to see academic-level discussions on animal ethics and to meet lots of interesting people. Here are some of my impressions.
I had forgotten how different my last five years of graduate education and teaching are from the world of critical theory. Dan Drezner quipped jokingly that lightning should have struck me down for mentioning Foucault in a class I took on International Law and International Relations with him and Joel Trachtman, and my current gig teaching undergrads at UMass Lowell tends not to spend much time on the intricacies of Knowledge-Power, interlocking oppressions, essentialism, and the other. If anything, many of my students at UML tend towards libertarianism, and even objectivism.
I also realized that I had never taken any sociology courses, either as an undergrad or at my two Master’s programs. In hindsight, this is probably too bad, because I think a lot of what I want to do as a PhD student would fit nicely in a sociology department, but I’ll admit that I have trouble getting beyond the power/hierarchy/oppression language that so dominates the field. Haidt’s recent study on political bias in academia also makes a good deal more sense to me now, as do the dangers of groupthink he was pointing out.
That said, there was lots of engaging material to mull over. Here are some snippets from some of the talks I attended.
Jodey Castricano, “The Fifth Discontinuity: Animal Rights, Posthumanism & When ‘Thinking About Animals is Unthinkable”
On Derrida’s concern re. ‘extending rights to animals’: “rights discourse has a way of configuring hierarchies… [and] repeat[ing] the exclusionary logic of the cartesian subject” through “epistemological structures that reify the logic of domination”
Craig McFarlane, “Critical Animal Studies”
Espousing an “anti-speciesist, anti-anthropocentric, anti-humanist” ethic by critiquing Regan & Singer as “still focusing on the ethical priority of humans”.
Eric Jonas, “When Species Part”
Focused on Derrida’s concept of hospitality to the other (to paraphrase: letting the other be the other in its particularity and singularity, and not subsuming it onto categories)
“The alterity of the other is the indefinite nature of its identity”, so “each experience of hospitality must create a new language”
Valery Giroux, “Toward Animal Equality: The Impossibility of Morally Justifying the Exploitation of Nonhuman Animals”
Using Aristotle’s principle of equality (treat like things alike, and different things differently), a conception of rights as “thick barriers of protection”, and a blend of Isaiah berlin on Positive Liberty and Alasdair Cochrane on negative liberty.
“This charity [of companion animal guardianship] is not justice…It is the power that allows us to treat well…there can be no real justice as long as there are real inequalities between sentient nonhuman animals.”
Kristen A. Hardy, “Cows, Pigs, and Whales: Rhetoric of Fatphobia & Logics of Human Exceptionalism”
Critiquing the use of the word “dehumanizing in critical fat studies by looking at axes of inclusion and exclusion (social, cultural, religio-ethical, philosophical, political), and by questioning “blanket declarations that food choices are out of bounds”.
Methods: photos of “silenced, headless fatties”, person-absent rhetoric (‘the overweight’ and ‘the obese’), and fatness as excessively bound to physicality and animalistic desires.
Andrew Murray, “In Vitro Meat: A New Development in the Ongoing Industrialization of Animal Bodies.”
On the role of substitutionism and ethical biocapital in New Harvest’s ongoing in vitro meat project, which is a “technical rather than anthropological fix” to the problem of farm animal use.
On the role of “the Michael Pollan obstacle” (i.e., that this is food science, not real food) and overcoming “socionatural obstacles”.
In the comments to Murray’s talk, a few people mentioned their concern that in vitro meat would “further estrange and disconnect people from their foodways”, and I mentioned that this has the potential to be the ultimate disruptive technology to the Tysons and Smithfields of the world. This last talk brought together a lot of key animals, food and society issues for me. As with vertical farming, these industrializations of food production (continuous rather than batched) raise concerns of further alienation from our means of production as we live in ever-more urban settings, but in vitro meat’s potential benefits from reduced environmental externalities to bypassing CAFO suffering to addressing world protein demand with functional foods (i.e., loaded with Omega-3s, or whatever’s nutritionally ‘hot’) are enormous.
I also thought that piece on fatphobia was excellent, as it highlighted an issue I notice all too often–when one marginalized group accuses a dominant group of ‘dehumanizing’ them (usually rightly), only to thereby reinforce potentially unjustified forms of speciesist exceptionalism.
Of all the talks, I had the most trouble with Valery Giroux’s, although it was well structured and cogently argued. I don’t agree with the idea that all forms of human-nonhuman interaction are categorically exploitative and therefore morally unjustifiable. I think this is one of the key places where my welfarism comes into conflict with the anti-hierarchical bent of most sociology and pretty much all critical theory. I don’t see why the symbiosis need always be parasitic, when human-animal relations have historically demonstrated all kinds of mutualist (or, at the very least, commensalist) bonds. This is, of course, not to underplay the fact that humans do unjustifiably exploit nonhuman animals on a massive scale every day. We do. But this is different than calling for a complete abolition whereby all canids and other domesticates would eventually revert to wildness. And even if I didn’t have problems at the level of theory, I can’t help but feel that this credo of total non-interference would actually be a death sentence for much of the world’s wild animals, whose habitat is increasingly threatened by myriad factors (hence the depressing line from Dale Jamieson’s “Against Zoos” “If zoos are like [Noah's ark], then rare animals are like passengers on a voyage of the damned.”)
All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet new people and hear interesting talks. And we got to see Niagara Falls.
I can see why some reviewers have their reservations, especially when comparing this to Mieville's other work, but I thought this was a brilliantly done deconstruction of the nature of sovereign authority. (This was the first book of his I'...
tagged:
favorites, reviewed, and speculative-fiction
It's hard to review this book without spoilers, and, as with the City and the City, the core "trick" is at the heart of this book. But, as with The City and the City, the trick doesn't feel like a trick, and it's woven seamlessly ...
tagged:
cognition, fantasy, favorites, reviewed, speculative-fiction, and to-r...
The first book was a fun page-turner and the second a passable reboot, but good lord this was a pitiful conclusion. Just read Hunger Games as a stand-alone and skip the rest, because you're not going to be satisfied. Far from it.
This is only listed as 'abandoned' because I made the mistake of seeing the movie before reading the book - the 100 or so pages I read of the book were engrossing, but too fundamentally similar to the film to make me want to keep reading. W...
I started skimming this book after a few chapters, but was engaged at first. My main gripe is that Caplan bows down too far at the altar of economics and public choice, while at the same time bending over to crap on democracy.
tagged:
democracy, economics, rationality, and reviewed
A broad-ranging and informative overview without descending into the muck of Smith-worship or ad hominem Marx-bashing (or worship) that characterizes so much of our political discourse. The supplementary focus on Ricardo and George was also...
tagged:
capitalism, economics, intellectual-history, reviewed, and socialism
This book needs to be understood as what it is, and not warped into something it isn't. (What it is, however, is an oddly secular stepchild of thoroughly Christian tradition.) Walzer's proclamantions about what 'counts' in just war - whethe...
If you're looking for an introduction to Singer's version of anti-speciesist utilitarianism, I would actually recommend some of his shorter work before this classic, which is actually quite dated. (indeed, it would be shocking if it weren't...
tagged:
animals, ethics, moral-philosophy, reviewed, speciesism, and utilitari...
If you can get past the God-speak, this is a really well written book. Scully is a former speechwriter for Dubya and Palin, and it shows (in multiple respects). This book makes odd bedfellows with Singer's Animal Liberation, to put it mildl...
A brilliant but deeply depressing and even wrong-headed book. It's the kind of work I might have loved in an alternate reality where I was an eco-ideologue and/or a near-nihilist pessimist, but as a pragmatist I just can't buy it. A fascina...
How could I not like Zodiac? It's a zany adventure caper about environmental policy set in my backyard. So what if it clearly has the amateurish air of an early novel - it's good, fast thinking fun.
This is one of the few works of speculative fiction that be read as essentially rephrasing one of the core tenets of Burke and Oakeshott's traditional conservatism: that social engineering projects often take you in very different direction...
Wu's book was a real eye-opener for me, as it was my first foray into the field of information theory. His overview of telegraphy, radio, telephone, television, and the internet all flowed seamlessly into his discussion of what he terms the...
This is a review of the whole trilogy, but is really a commentary on the bioethical question at the core of the third book. The idea that we could genetically evolve aggression out of our genome is presented here in the context of a fascina...
PKD was one of my favorite authors throughout high school, and it was fascinating to read this biography almost a decade later and to realize that one of the reasons I may have liked him so much is may latently possess some of the same neur...
Captures the absurdities of war and the morass of partisan infighting, and it does so with the honest and open tone that makes Orwell's work always many steps above the rest. My favorite: the scene where the fascist is running around withou...
Whatever else your views of the man, or this book, you have to admit that Orwell was legit. He worked in a coal mine. He tramped around before it was hipster-grotesque-cool. He fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and got shot in th...
This underlooked Orwell classic documents and equally underlooked phenomenon: the struggles faced by those living not in poverty but on the outskirts of 'respectability': those who cannot give in to living poorly and dirtily, and being cont...
I use this book as the textbook for the animal studies class I teach both at UMass Lowell and at the Tufts Experimental College (wikis: ikesharpless.pbworks.com / animalethics.pbworks.com). There are a couple of other readers in the field, ...
tagged:
animals, ethics, food, language, reviewed, and science
My biggest takeaway when I read Gilgamesh was how universal, even somehow modern, most of its themes were. Pair this with the fact that it's among the oldest - if not the oldest - extant work of written fiction, and, well, that says somethi...
Twain and Orwell top the list of 'authors whose collected works are ignored because they have one or two really famous, now even cliched, books'. (On the case of Orwell, pretty much every book of his other than the Clergyman's Daughter is a...
tagged:
favorites, reviewed, and speculative-fiction
The only reason I can surmise that this work doesn't get more attention is because Joan of Arc is so different from Twain's other books. But it truly is a thing of beauty, his lack of satiric bite and surprisingly pro-French (or maybe just ...
A gorgeous work; rarely have I felt such a sense of reality in the way Banks paints his portraits of individual lives and blends them into a collage depicting how communities respond to senseless tragedies.
Yes, he's pretty much a neocon. And yes, this is a pugnaciously aggressive book. But the basic argument - that it's rational for both Europe and American to behave as if they live in posthistory and history, respective - is an important ins...
As with many such classics, this book requires a substantial background in the social contract tradition to properly engage with its core arguments. (I could write a similar review of various other works - reviews of Leviathan that take no ...
I liked these essays a lot, probably because I agree with Berlin's conception of rights as being often in both internal and external conflict (as Sandel put it, of Berlin, that we live in a 'tragically configured moral universe'). Too bad a...
tagged:
human-rights, moral-philosophy, political-philosophy, and reviewed
Provides an overview of the laws, actors, and strategic challenges surrounding ten different international environmental regimes: whaling, toxics, climate change, ozone, biodiversity, fisheries, forests, and a coupla others.
Dahl argues that the term 'polyarchy' is a more accurate description than 'democracy' when it comes to most countries we tend to call democracies (he also has a very high bar for what it would be required for a country to be a democracy - a...
There's definitely a fine line between historical fiction and utter garbage, but this fun series maintains something like a skein of attempted accuracy while crafting a romping fun yarn.
tagged:
historical-fiction, reviewed, and trashy-fun
It may have helped that I read this book, set partly in the Mediterranean, while on honeymoon in Greece. But I thought it was a masterfully crafted work, and it avoided the trap of being 'a book about a hermaphrodite'. Instead, it was a bea...
I'm a huge fan of Bittman's work, both in his minimalist and post-minimalist stages, but I couldn't help but see this as a lesser hybrid of Omnivore's Dilemma (the text part) and Diet for a Small Planet (the recipes part). It was good for w...
tagged:
environment, food, food-ethics, and reviewed
I agree with Keith's review (below): "With its heart in the right place, this book needs an editor--it reads like a rambling, book-length review article." The topic is clearly important, and I'm happy that it has spawned a bunch o...
A wordy and disturbing mess - I only made it through around book five - but Donaldson's stories are powerfully told and deeply polyvalent. Maybe I'll finish the Chronicles one of these days...
tagged:
dark, disturbing, fantasy, reviewed, and wordy
At this point, Feist's just totally lost me - I was a big fan for a while, but every new iteration seems little more than a trite, hackneyed, and predictable serving of more of the same.
This is the closest I have come to that elusive great American novel. If all you want is narration of a story, look elsewhere, but anyone who thinks that the English language lacks exuberance needs to read this book.
tagged:
favorites, great-use-of-language, and reviewed
I read this as background to prepare for a trip to Chile, and it definitely helped add both a personal and political layer to my understanding of the Pinochet years.
A fabulous, multilayered text. I can only begin to appreciate Ariosto's masterpiece, approaching it as I did through the lens of a third language (Italian). An understanding of Ariosto's patronage situation -- and of Dante and the Bible, at...
Peter Singer, one of the most philosophically consistent thinkers out there (for better and for worse, many would say), discussing the inconsistencies of Dubya's ethics. This book is pretty much what you think it's going to be.
These books should *not* be approached as anything even vaguely resembling practical, serious, or useful. They're for play, and do a fantastic job at that.
tagged:
favorites, funny, polemicists-curmudgeons, reviewed, silly, and words
Another one of those works that I think are thrust on people too young - this trilogy really gets at the core of a lot of key aspects of the human condition. I especially like the conflict between state and family laid out in Antigone, as i...
tagged:
civilization, classics, human-nature, reviewed, taboo, and tragedy-con...
Aeschelus' trilogy leaves me with one overpowering message: he demonstrates the need to overcome blood feuding cycles in which everyone is to blame and everyone has cause for retribution (a catch-22, if you will). Although Aeschelus' soluti...
A beautiful book, in many different ways. It's also fun to assign some Leopold to my environmental studies students, because the writing is so different from most of the ethics, policy, and science stuff we look at. 'Thinking Like a Mountai...
tagged:
environment, ethics, great-use-of-language, and reviewed
I added some of Rand's nonfiction to my Political Thought syllabus after soliciting input from my students (I paired her with Milton Friedman for the day). Although I haven't read much other than this and her Introduction to Objectivist Epi...
I browsed rather than read this, and I think it can be summarized thus: 'people used to play in the woods, but now we think it's full of homeless people and pedophiles.'
This book was great. I'll admit, it probably wouldn't speak to a non-Scrabbler, but it showed just how far down the rabbit hole one can go. On the one hand, Fatsis gave me a number of tactical tools for a Scrabble arsenal and painted master...
I loved this book when I read it in high school, but in retrospect I think a lot of that is because it filled a number of niches I was craving at the time: 'secret knowledge' (hence the 'gnosis' in gnostics - a lot of the PKD stuff I was re...
The reviewer who indicates that this is not a good introduction to the thinkers in question is probably right - this book is best read with a fair amount of relevant reading under your belt. Personally, I think Kaufmann's analysis is brilli...
tagged:
intellectual-history, philosophy, and reviewed
Funny how a book called One-Dimensional Man could be so, well, one-dimensional. As in: the critique of homo economicus is well taken, but the caricature is beaten to death.
tagged:
capitalism, critical-theory, obscurantism, and reviewed
If I had to pick between Asterix and Tintin, I'd go with Asterix for sure. Yes, it's sillier and more childish, but they withstand read after read without getting stale. The delicious wordplay helps, too.
I'm probably biased in favor of this play - I saw a production of it in LA with Ian McKellan as Stockmann. McKellan could play a garbage can and make me think it was the most interesting garbage can in the world.
tagged:
against-the-grain, civilization, and reviewed
This was easily the best book I read for an Anthropology of Development course I took as an undergrad. Lesotho is geographically, historically, and culturally a fascinating case study, and this is a good primer on how the World Bank can mes...
A smorgasbord of mini-biographies, a farrago of informational facts. I was expecting this book to be similar to Wu's The Master Switch, but it's a very different breed. Gleick pastes together a rough chronology of the history of language, g...
This book helped to shape my views on the role of technology in society - it's a fascinating overview of the machine gun's integration into warfare from the Maxim gun in the late 19th century to the brutally asymmetrical colonial wars in Af...
There are some books that I think are unfortunately lost on the high schoolish audience to which they are universally subjected: this is one such book. (Moby Dick and Jekyll/Hyde are others, the former for its girth and the latter for its r...
tagged:
biotech, classics, favorites, reviewed, and science
A serious attempt at addressing a monumentally difficult issue, with mixed success. Some might say he 'sold out' his domestic conception of justice to appease what is clearly a "reasonable" version of political Islam. Either way, ...
tagged:
international, political-philosophy, political-science, and reviewed
I think the issue of branding and the omnipresence of advertising should be taken seriously (hey, I gave Farenheit 451 five stars and I write a food policy blog on these issues...), but I can't help but think that Klein is both a hack and a...
(This is a review of all the Sandman graphic novels...) Gaiman works best in this hybrid form - I loved most of these books, even though the shifting illustrators took some getting used to, and I liked some a lot more than others. The theme...
tagged:
comics-broadly, fantasy, favorites, monsters, myth, reviewed, and spec...
An excellent overview of an important and nuanced figure who sadly gets drowned out in the capitalist-v-socialist poo throwing competition. What I most remember about this book, though, is that I was reading it on an airplane and the person...
tagged:
intellectual-history, political-philosophy, reviewed, and socialism
The English translation of Levi's title, "Survival at Auschwitz", is one of the worst mistranslations in history. A literal translation is "if this is a man", which has literally the opposite meaning, and which more clos...
This book captures both Dawkins greatness and his debilitating hostility to any perspective other than his own. His description of how a primitive eye could and did develop through descent with modification through natural selection - essen...
tagged:
evolution, religion, reviewed, and science
The closest I've found to a kindred philosophy to my pick-and-choose blend of various schools of moral, political, and aesthetic thought. I really loved this book, and I'm surprised I hadn't come across Rorty earlier.
tagged:
empathy, moral-philosophy, pragmatism, and reviewed
Read this as background for my honeymoon in Greece. It is what it says it is, although my level of knowledge about modern Greek politics was precisely zero before reading this. I can know say that it's at least a little better than zero, wh...
It's hard to understate the importance of this work, which should really be thought of as a relic of an oral tradition: reading it, alone, from a page doesn't capture the original intent of its rhythm and rhyme. That said, I agree that tran...
This line still sticks with me, a decade after first reading this fabulous translation: "Down through the moors, in off the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping."
tagged:
classics, great-use-of-language, monsters, reviewed, and the-other
A truly devastating collection - I read these stories almost a decade ago, and some of them stick with me to this day. The core lesson here is a difficult one to swallow: one of the greatest crimes of the Holocaust was that, in many cases, ...
tagged:
empathy, human-rights, really-sad, reviewed, and wwii
A solid introduction to ecofeminism in particular and Shiva's brand of anti-globalization agroecology more generally (although Earth Democracy provides more of an 'entry level' critique). As with most work of this nature, I think this book ...
tagged:
dark-green, development, environment, feminism, reviewed, and science
I've used this book in my Intro to Comparative Politics class to help my students understand electoral reform, but I suspect I enjoyed it a lot more than they did. It's pretty dense and technical, but provides lots of comparative data to di...
