Dr. Andrew Weil posted his review of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, "Eating Animals" yesterday:The Moral Ferocity of Eating Animals
The topic is polarizing, but it was this part of Weil's review that stood out for me:
"In the Internet age, as our attention is diced into ever-tinier blog posts, blurbs, bleats and tweets, some have speculated that books are obsolete. Millions are satisfied with non sequitur eruptions. What good are works that span 300 pages? One answer is that adopting a truly life-changing idea -- like radically changing one's eating habits -- takes time and persuading.""Millions are satisfied with non sequitur eruptions." ... Is curiosity on the wane?
6 comments:
"non sequitur eruptions" Is that breakouts from bad puns?
I enjoy reading and writing blog comments, but they will never take the place of a good book. I'm slowly reading my way through Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories."
I haven't read Taubes' book cover-to-cover, read some. I think he's a great investigative journalist. He makes some good points.
"The topic is polarizing"
Not really.
Do you know anyone, besides people whose jobs depend on it, that thinks factory farmed animals is a good thing?
The controversy seem only to arise when the particulars and practicalities of such aspirations are discussed.
I disagree with Weil's criticism of the Internet. The information age is proving instrumental to the growing food and diet communities and I can't help but think that the rapid interest in this decades old issue of factory farming is getting mainstream attention due to the rise of available information besides dusty paperback copies of some hippy manifestos.
There's an immediate wealth of quality information from newspaper articles, to book previews, entire scanned books and magazine libraries, science based research journals, archived radio, podcasts, and videos that would never typically be seen on network television, and blogs by knowledgeable, yet unaffiliated authors that can be far more than just an online diary.
the burden of bad ideas by heather mac donald -- i am reading that right now.
books are not a replacement. but one must also know what is the stand point of the author as a person -leftist, rightist, consumptionist, ete etc.
blogs are a new phenomenon, until 5 years ago, though blogs existed it was not very alive -
blogs are citizen's voice - aren't we tired of media belting it out.
blogs exist for variety of reasons
Curious culture where eating dog may land you in jail, but the more intelligent pig is fair game.
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