Jonathan Safran Foer is asking his fellow Americans to stop eating meat, said Adam Sternbergh in New York. Not all meat, necessarily, and maybe not forever. But the young author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recently took a break from writing novels to produce a book-length meditation on the ethics of eating other living creatures. Thoughtful people, he’s concluded, should renounce virtually all the meat they encounter at supermarkets and restaurants. “I’m not against meat philosophically,” he insists. “I don’t know if I think it’s wrong.” What concerns him is the ecological damage currently caused by Big Agriculture and the cruelties visited upon livestock.
Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, advocates a veritable boycott of
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”