A capable blend of dietary, religious, and political history that will please like-minded readers—but perhaps prompt...
Would the world be a better place if humans stopped eating things with faces? Indubitably, asserts English food-writer Spencer in this lively if sometimes debatable treatise.
Vegetarianism “is the diet which Gaia approves of and, if the human race are her infants, it is the only one by which she will suckle her brood,” writes Spencer (The Heretic’s Feast, not reviewed, etc.), taking for the purposes of argument the point of the view of the true-believer, extreme “vegetarian lobby”—a stance that he does not deliver from “the image of the morally earnest and the downright cranky.” More prosaically and less annoyingly, Spencer observes that as omnivores with a broad range of dietary choices, modern humans do not need meat in order to survive, except in extreme conditions where food plants cannot grow; a meatless diet is both healthier and more humane. Much of this attempts to provide that thesis with a pedigree, an effort in which Spencer is only partly successful. At the outset, for instance, he advances sketchy claims about what our hominid ancestors did and did not eat, ignoring or brushing aside such inconvenient evidence as the dentition pattern of ancestral and even modern humans, with incisors developed for the tearing of flesh, not the gnashing of grain. His examination of the role of vegetarianism in utopian thought is much more interesting. Plato’s ideal Republic, for instance, was meatless, and so is the heaven of the Jains and some Hindus and Buddhists. As for Hitler’s supposedly vegetarian regime, Spencer notes that though the Führer believed meat-eating was harmful, he did not force that particular view on his subjects and even outlawed vegetarian societies. Even so, after Hitler, vegetarian literature no longer claims that “war would be ended if only humanity abstained from meat and the slaughter of animals.”
A capable blend of dietary, religious, and political history that will please like-minded readers—but perhaps prompt contrarians to cook up a cheeseburger, rare.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56858-238-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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