A heartfelt call for compassion for all living species.
Why bonding with animals makes us better human beings.
Neurologist Akhtar (Animals and Public Health, 2012), deputy director of the Army’s Traumatic Brain Injury Program and a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, makes an impassioned and moving argument that empathy with animals deeply affects humans’ health. Drawing on interviews with a wide range of individuals, including prisoners, a serial killer, a vegetarian chicken farmer, animal researchers, and victims of PTSD; scientific studies; and her own experience as a sexually abused and bullied young girl who bonded with an abused dog, the author examines the physical, emotional, and psychological responses that occur when humans connect with any animal, not only common house pets. Animals, she writes, “calm us by lowering our blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones. We relax with animals” because they “defuse a lot of the human-generated pressure in our lives.” The beneficial response, one psychologist suggests, comes from the release of oxytocin, a hormone that “increases social interaction, generosity, bonding, and attachment. It also improves trust and decreases aggression, fear, and hyperarousal.” Many organizations, writes Akhtar, promote human-animal connection, such as K9s for Warriors, a nonprofit group that “pairs dogs with military veterans who have PTSD”; Feeding Pets of the Homeless; Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, which rescues farm animals; and FORWARD, an organization that establishes cat sanctuaries in prisons, where inmates care for and socialize abandoned or abused cats. The cats, Akhtar notes, “provide the only physical contact and affection many of the inmates receive.” The author’s research uncovers much animal cruelty at the hands of individuals and in the livestock industry, which she describes in sickening detail. “It is the same mind-set that encourages cruelty toward animals and toward other humans,” she asserts, whereas empathy encourages kindness: “Animals remind us that the world is larger than us. They can teach us to look beyond the racism, poverty, and cruelty in our lives.” A brief appendix offers readers suggestions for positive change.
A heartfelt call for compassion for all living species.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-070-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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