Best books … chosen by Martha Grimes

Dominion by Matthew Scully (St. Martin’s, $16). “Canned” hunts, Safari Club conventions, and factory farming. A crushingly sad account of the many ways in which animals are savagely treated in our society and the many ways in which humans rationalize that treatment.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (Penguin, $16). That hamburger you’re eating was barely kissed by a cow. Pollan’s tour of four meals opens our eyes to our increasingly great distance from the natural world, how little we know about the food we eat, and how far the circumstances that produced it are from the images in our minds.

Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz (Prometheus, $19). Hold your breath and grit your teeth. A 1997 investigation of the meatpacking industry that shows us the cruelties inflicted on farm animals and the gross neglect by government agencies to enforce the law. Resistant cattle? Shove electric prods down their throats. And that’s before they get inside the slaughterhouse.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (Harper Perennial, $15). Since Upton Sinclair said in 1906 in The Jungle that human beings were cogs “in the great packing machine,” not much has changed. This recent landmark investigation of the fast-food industry shows us the cynical opportunism beneath the great burger dome.

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat (Back Bay, $13). In the 1960s, the Canadian government suspected that packs of marauding wolves were slaughtering caribou. Mowat was sent to investigate. What the biologist-author saw was that the wolves he lived among were family-oriented, intelligent, and loyal. Mowat debunks the myth that a wolf would as soon leap at your throat as look at you.

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Ballantine, $14). This 2004 work gives us ample evidence that animals share our emotions, from the pig who sang on a beach beneath the moon to the acute grief of the cow whose calf was taken away. That pigs and cows could possibly have feelings is something we don’t want to admit. We might have to stop eating them.