Amazing Buzz on New Book: Eating Animals
I’ve never seen this kind of buzz on a new book before, and since I’m a sucker for book buzz and hype, and I haven’t actually read the book yet, I’ll just pass on some of the buzz and hype about Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.
From Aaron Gross on Huffington Post:
The Most Important Conversation in Our Lifetimes Might Just Begin with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Latest Book
Over the next weeks Huffington Post will feature a diverse range of responses to Jonathan Safran Foer’s controversial new work of non-fiction, Eating Animals. But these aren’t your usual book reviews. They are the start of a conversation that some powerful people in agribusiness would rather we not have.
Imagine that tomorrow scientists report that a single action, something that most of us do every day, was discovered to be the leading human cause of global warming. And one of the top two or three causes of every other major environmental problem at the local and global level. Even more, this same action appears to have been a decisive factor in the development of the H1N1 “swine flu” and continues to stimulate the growth of pathogens resistant to antimicrobial drugs. Imagine further that this action causes billions of farmed animals annually to suffer in ways that virtually all Americans say should be illegal. And, finally, that this action has lead to the decimation of American farm communities from North Carolina to central California.
Here’s the publisher’s description, which uses the wonderful phrase, “profound moral ferocity.” In book buzz, it doesn’t get any better than “profound moral ferocity.”
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.
Here’s an Amazon reader’s comment:
The buzz about this book was so incredible I had to get my hands on an advanced copy … Foer never preaches. He shares his own beliefs and asks us to live by our own standards, not his … The material about his grandmother and how she survived the holocaust is really powerful. The stuff about his dog George (Foer makes a mock case for eating dogs) is hilarious. His storytelling is so compelling that you hardly realize how much information he’s conveying (there are 60 pages of notes documenting his sources, but the text itself is uncluttered by footnotes). Another unique thing about this book is that Foer actually sneaks into a factory farm in the middle of the night… Eating Animals is a serious book that could change the way you live.
Finally, here’s Foer describing the book:
One thought on “Amazing Buzz on New Book: Eating Animals”
Great post! Thanks, Don!