Recommended Books

[VeganSoldier]

If you are looking for a good list of AR/Vegan books: http://www.animalrightscommunity.com/books/
I am sure you'll find some amoung that list that you like.

[AlisonCole]

Denise, do you think that book would be a good one for the readers group?

[denise]

I think most of it (The Face on Your Plate) would be old hat to most of us. But I would go to a group meeting on it, and would be happy to discuss parts of it, like the fish section and the odd bit in other chapters.

[denise]

Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl, by Stacey O'Brien 2008

This is absolutely the best animal story I've read since I don't know when. It is thoroughly engaging from cover to cover. The 'girl' in the story is a biologist specializing in wild-animal behavior. Highly readable and sprinkled with bits of fascinating owl lore and personal anecdotes. Warning: she had to feed Wesley mice, not nice at all.

I'm returning my borrowed copy to the library on Tuesday.

[AlisonCole]

I would love to read that! (now I know what you meant when you said you were busy "reading about owls")

[AlisonCole]

These 2 new upcoming books by Jonathan Balcombe look great!

Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals
Palgrave Macmillan, March 2010, with foreword by John Coetzee

Once viewed only as mindless automatons, animals are now known to have rich sensory and emotional complexity. In this trailblazing new book, Jonathan Balcombe, animal behaviorist and author of Pleasurable Kingdom, draws on new research, observational studies, and personal anecdotes to reveal the full spectrum of animal experience. He also provides a fresh challenge to traditional views of wild nature, and spells out why the human-animal relationship needs a complete overhaul.


Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure
University of California Press, September 2010

Exultant Ark presents the first pictorial volume to focus on animals’ positive experiences. With contributions from some of the world’s finest animal photographers, this handsome coffee-table book will showcase the rich landscapes of pleasure in animals. Large, color photographs depict a diversity of animals engaging in such rewarding activities as playing, feeding, greeting, grooming and preening each other, courting, mating, parenting, seeking comfort, and relaxing.

[denise]

I look forward to those, especially The Inner Lives of Animals.

[Megan]

I suspect Strategic Action for Animals: A Handbook on Strategic Movement Building, Organizing, and Activism for Animal Liberation might be better than other books on animal strategy, because as far as I know, those books weren't written by anyone who has a PhD in the social sciences, whereas this one is (Melanie Joy has a PhD in psychology). I'm skeptical of the validity of the activism endorsed by people who don't have a degree in the social sciences from an accredited university (or who don't have a degree but who have done a lot of reading on their own time by authors who do have such a degree). I'm just really wary of armchair philosophizing, since I know it can lead to incorrect conclusions. For example, most people unread in psychology would think that the more people who witness you being physically assaulted, for example, the better, right? Because there would be more of a chance of you getting helped, right? WRONG. The more people who witness your victimization, the worse off you are, because there is a thing called the DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY: everyone thinks that someone else has already phoned 911, so they feel less weight on their shoulders. It's the same thing with a lot of other phenomena in psychology: the common expectation is actually the opposite of the findings of the laboratory results and case studies.

http://www.lanternbooks.com/detail.html ... 1590561362
http://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Action- ... PDKIKX0DER

Another one is Vegetarianism: Movement or Moment? by Donna Maurer (PhD in sociology).

Vegetarians and Vegans in America Today (American Subcultures) by Karen and Michael Iacobbo
http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarians-Vegan ... 145&sr=1-6
It sounds from the reviews that this book was written by two journalists, but I still think it might be good to read, if only for entertainment's sake.
Here are some quotes of reviews from the above Amazon webpage that I think illustrate the sociological paradigm of this book:
"Karen Iacobbo (Johnson & Wales Univ., RI) and journalist Michael Iacobbo have prepared a polemic promoting vegetarian/vegan subcultures, lifestyles, and philosophy, primarily through their many informants. They discuss motivation for and benefits of becoming vegetarian/vegan, tenets of vegetarian/vegan philosophy, characteristics of the subculture,..."-Choice
"...Shattering stereotypes, this book spotlights the various subcultures within the movement, from crunchy hippies to hardcore punks, pro-life compassionate conservatives to retired professionals...."-VegNews
"This book is a treasure trove of the wide variety of views from vegetarians and the variety of aspects they have opinions on. This is a must-read for anyone who wants a comprehensive overview of the current state of thought and action.”–Rachel M. MacNair, Ph.D Director of the Institute for Integrated Social Analysis...

I would also be interested in attending a book discussion about Scars by A. Breeze Harper http://web.mac.com/sistahvegan98/iWeb/r ... _Book.html , since one of the main characters in the book is a vegan. However, I don't think the main focus of the book is on the natural environment, animal cruelty, or health, but neither did Guns, Germs, and Steel have any of those as its main focus either, and we still read that one.

It is $4.00 US for the digital version, and $14.00 US for the paperback from Lulu http://www.lulu.com/content/1878019 To my knowledge this is the only place you can buy it from.

And of course I would like to read Sistah Vegan! Food, Identity, Health and Society: Black Female Vegans Speak
http://web.mac.com/sistahvegan98/iWeb/r ... Vegan.html
It's supposedly coming out September 2009. I say supposedly because there have been so many times the dates have been pushed back.

Please use this messageboard's private messaging ("PM") feature to alert me to the date of meetups to discuss any one of these books, if the group so chooses to review any of these books. I would be really interested in discussing these books I've mentioned with other people in person. Don't worry about someone else already alerting me; I don't mind if I get three or four PM's in my inbox from three or four different people. I'd be more upset if there was a meeting for one of those books and no one informed me about it.

[denise]

This one that Megan mentioned - Vegetarians and Vegans in America Today - looks interesting. I wonder what the chapter called Vegudice is about.

http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarians-Vegan ... 145&sr=1-6

[Megan]

I'm guessing "Vegudice" means the prejudice vegans hold against lacto-ovo vegetarians and the like, or it could mean the prejudice nonvegetarians hold against vegetarians?

"One Struggle, One Fight? Human Freedom Is Not Animal Rights (And Why This Matters)" is the title of a chapter in the Melanie Joy book that made me really intrigued and desirous of reading this book.

[chris]

Hello members of the Readers' Group. I stumbled across a website the other day that you might find very useful.

http://www.librarything.com/

You can actually set up your personal profile but I thought it would also be handy to have an Earthsave Canada organizational profile.
Take a look at it - it is an easy way to put order to your existing books (and this is why I'm thinking it might be useful to Earthsave Canada), reach out to other members who are interested in the same topics (you''ll notice that there are some vegan groups that aren't active - instead of setting up a new one you might want to energize one of the existing ones).

When you have had a chance to look at it I would appreciate any feedback.
I don't think your group handles what we have in the ESC resource centre do you? (You would think I would know that by now)

[AlisonCole]

Yes, I love this tool, LibraryThing. In fact, I love it so much I had all of our Earthsave library catalogue put on this site several years ago. It can be viewed here: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Earthsave
Thanks for reminding me about this.

[breezeharper]

Dear Megan,

I just wanted to let you know that the Sistah Vegan Anthology is coming out this year. It just keeps on getting pushed to a later date because the volume keeps on getting sent back to me so I can make it "cleaner" and more concise. It's my first anthology, so I'm learning a lot along the way. I just handed Lantern a 3rd revision, last Friday. I am hoping it will be the last.

Best,
Breeze Harper
www.sistahveganproject.com

[nancy]

Congratulations on this, Breeze. I have read your website and it is interesting.

[dsteele]

Here's a more general book that i'd like us to consider:

The Financial Times (London) November 7 2009

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f0d2518-ca62 ... abdc0.html

BOOKS
Non-Fiction

Our Choice

Review by Tristram Stuart

'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis'
By Al Gore
Bloomsbury £16.99, 416 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

For those who felt that former US vice-president and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Al Gore left a few questions unanswered in An Inconvenient Truth, his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, offers full redress. Many of Gore's ideas are inevitably familiar, but the clarity of his argument and the fissile power of his analysis combine to elevate Our Choice into the top-ranking environmental books of our time.

Above all, Gore's magisterial way with words should administer the electric shock required to defibrillate policymakers from their present semi-comatose state. In addition, Our Choice is illustrated with a stunning array of photographs and diagrams.

Gore's roadmap for the survival of human civilisation is clearly marked. But Our Choice still makes for painful reading. It is depressing to see how many of the mistaken paths and illusory solutions Gore warns against are in fact the ones our political leaders are pursuing. This is true of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) whereby carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-fired power stations can be captured and pumped into porous rock formations deep underground. As Gore explains, coal companies have "aggressively promoted the illusion that CCS is actually near at hand". They thereby persuaded policy makers to allow them to continue building new "capture ready" coal-fired power stations, even though key issues regarding this expensive technology are as yet unresolved.

Pillaging the public purse to subsidise dangerous and uneconomic nuclear power stations makes no sense either when there are commercially available technologies capable of producing clean power immediately.

Wind energy is already so efficient it could provide 20 per cent of the energy mix without delay. There is also a range of solar devices that would be adequate to provide the entire world's energy requirements several times over. The variable supply of wind and sun can be compensated by installing a reliable base load source. Gore's favourite issue here is the unjustly neglected geothermal energy, which taps heat from beneath the surface of the earth.

To connect all these energy sources to each other, as well as to an electric automobile fleet, he calls for the installation of high-efficiency supergrids, such as the one being built in China. He is adamant that such progress would occur naturally if the damage done by global warming were adequately reflected in the cost of emitting carbon.

Energy aside, deforestation is also wreaking havoc by releasing at least 20 per cent of all greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Gore alludes to the agreement to achieve a reduction of emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) to be finalised at the Copenhagen climate summit. But his book was written before the desperately ill-advised removal of a critical clause that ensured that countries could not merely replace virgin forest with ecologically and carbon-depleted commercial plantations.

Subsidies and legislation in the US, Europe and in south-east Asian countries have been encouraging the conversion of food into fuel and the destruction of the remaining forests to produce biofuels. Instead of encouraging the wasteful overproduction of food, Gore argues that farmers should be rewarded for accumulating carbon in soils. Gore's admission that producing "ethanol from corn is a mistake" constitutes a supremely graceful climb-down from the former champion of the US bioethanol industry.

For the sake of the planet and everything that lives on it, let us hope that the rest of the world's political leaders will be as nimble as he is when it comes to reversing the trends of their current disastrous policies.

[denise]

Has anyone read Strategic Action for Animals by Melanie Joy? I saw it mentioned on (December 3rd's post) Virginia Messina's blog. http://veggiedietitian.blogspot.com/200 ... -that.html
I think Joy also wrote Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows, due out December 29th.

[AlisonCole]

The book only just came out last month! But I want us to read it for the Readers Group.

We will be interviewing Melanie about her book on the Animal Voices radio show next Friday, December 11th. The show is from 12-1pm on 102.7fm CFRO in Vancouver. You can also listen online at www.coopradio.org , and soon (hopefully) I will get the episode uploaded on the web to listen to.

[denise]

A review of Pollan's latest, Food Rules, a tiny tome:

http://www.amazon.com/Food-Rules-Eaters ... ewpoints=1

[denise]

Neither Banyen nor Chapters had Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows on order when I checked recently - although Banyen wondered why not and intended to check into it. I have ordered one through Duthies, and it should arrive next Tuesday. I'm sure anyone could do the same, although it may be cheaper to get it online.