Learned, compassionate, and disconcerting, this is a major contribution to the literature on animal welfare.
A beautifully written reflection on the enduring conceit of human exceptionalism and the resultant harm caused to animals.
Two suppositions guide this book. One is that all Earth’s creatures possess “an indefatigable determinedness of self”—for this reason, they have a right to flourishing lives. Humans are neither behaviorally nor morally superior, nor are animals “a thing apart.” Animals and humans are equal in moral standing: “If I have a soul, so do my birds,” writes Woolfson, acclaimed author of Corvus: A Life With Birds and Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. Our response to the “egregious, destructive, purposely and wantonly cruel” treatment that animals often receive from humans should be nothing short of indignation. The other supposition is that “our behavior towards the natural world” is shaped by the diverse ways that we interact with it. Woolfson weaves together a rich array of personal anecdotes, historical documents, novels, religious scripture, philosophical ruminations, and scientific studies to explore human-animal encounters: killing them for food, hunting them for pleasure, subjecting them to experiments, displaying them in museums, farming them for use in clothing, and living with them as pets. Woolfson is particularly concerned about arguments that defend human cruelty, as when “tradition” is called on to justify hunting whales and killing birds. Throughout, Woolfson’s prose is lyrical—e.g., “the heavy hum of insects in scented air”; regarding vivisection, she recalls accounts “so graphic and disturbing that, like the whispered memories from prolonged and punishing sieges, peculiarly sanguinary battles or wanton massacres, they live to be revisited.” While the author exercises restraint when it comes to justified outrage, she does not wholly resist: “Eric and Donald Trump Jr., enthusiastic ‘big game hunters’, were famously photographed with their kill—a leopard, an elephant, a buffalo. One of them holds up an elephant’s severed tail. They smile, as they all do, bathed in the full glow of their malignant vacuity.”
Learned, compassionate, and disconcerting, this is a major contribution to the literature on animal welfare.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63936-276-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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