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The Lives of Animalsby Coetzee, J. M
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Book Description1999 Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ; ISBN 0-691-00443-9.. 1st printing, hardcover, dust jacket; both the book and jacket are in fine condition. A review copy with publisher's material laid in. A novella that introduces the ethical issues of animal abuse. As with many University Publishing, the jacket does not have a printed price. Book summaryThese angry lectures about the ethics of the human-animal relationship were given at Princeton, ostensibly by a novelist named Elizabeth Costello; this volume also includes commentary on Coetzee's ideas by Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Windy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts.Media Reviews"Frankly, there are going to be some who say this is the sort of exercise that gives intellectual discourse a bad name, and while I'm sympathetic to the cause, I'll have to agree with them--with the glowing exception of Smuts' essay, this is arid, didactic stuff....That doesn't make THE LIVES OF ANIMALS bad--Booker Prize-winning Coetzee has no trouble turning a phrase or crisply encapsulating an idea--but it does make it unlikely that it's going to find much of an audience beyond the converted, or those paid to write reviews." -- Douglas Cruickshank, Salon "For Costello (and perhaps Coetzee) the writer, not only is it possible to imagine oneself as another being, and thus to empathize with that being's suffering (the absence which she feels was the Nazis' greatest crime), but through the poetic mind we can 'bring the living body into being within ourselves.' This offers us a more profoundly transformative experience of animals than discovered through philosophy. Costello acknowledges the irony that this experience does not mean we have to treat animals better, merely that we depict them and ourselves in a truer, less self-indulgent light." -- Martin Rowe "THE LIVES OF ANIMALS is a strange book, as surprising and idiosyncratic as anything Coetzee has ever written." -- Elizabeth Lowry, London Review of Books Publisher NotesThe idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Here the internationally renowned writer J.M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Other Recommended Books
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