Books Archive – Page 6 of 18

Kindling

A collection of beautifully poignant and moving poems and artwork from a talented artist who spent a summer interacting with the animals on an organic meat farm.

In the summer of 2019, artist and poet Linnea Ryshke worked as a laborer at an organic meat farm. She transformed what she saw, as well as the specific and acute interactions she had with the animals, into a series of poems, photographs, and artwork. Ryshke’s intimate, honest, and poignant account reflects what it means to confront the lives and deaths of individual creatures who are valued commodities. Through image and text, Kindling profoundly evokes experiences with animals that will leave a lasting impression on the reader.

“It is difficult to find the balance between art and activism. Linnea Ryshke’s, Kindling, weaves poetry, photography, and painting into a heartbreakingly beautiful book about finding and holding space for the more-than-human. She creates a lasting dialogue between embodiment and materiality, the didactic and the ambiguous, and art and activism that avoids the trap of overt sentimentality. Kindling provides us that elusive and magical space in between, where empathy and change can flourish and grow.”—Kathryn Eddy, artist activist and co-editor of The Art of the Animal: Fourteen Women Artists Explore the Sexual Politics of Meat

“So many poets use non-human animals as metaphors, motivators, comforts. Linnea Ryshke takes a refreshingly different tack in her work: She sees other animals. And she doesn’t just see, she witnesses. She shares with us using language that is apt, deft, unflinching, breathtaking. But Ryshke’s empathy and craft aren’t ends in themselves; they lead us where we desperately need to go: a kinder world. Yes, art can do that. Yes, this art does that.”—Gretchen Primack, poet and author of Kind

“Kindling is a book that echoes in the reader long after closing the book. The images and poetry of Linnea Ryshke lead us to not only reckon with the violence perpetuated against animals, but to witness their resistance and agency. Gentle yet piercing, Kindling achieves what so much of our culture fails in: seeing animal others without possessing them. What emerges from that view is a silent yet powerful demand to, in Ryshke’s words, ‘know them as kin, not kindling.'”—Terike Haapoja, artist

“Kindling is unlike any work I have read. It is a book for the senses— visceral—and meant to be breathed in, if you are brave. It reveals Linnea Ryshke as scholar-empath-artist-poet. She weaves together drawings, photographs and words, asking us to see, hear and understand oneness with all living beings. It is wild—delving into experiment and offering the reader an experience. To read Kindling is to take passage through gore and truth. We are asked to muster the courage to look, to digest the words, to see anew.”—Colleen Plumb, photographer with her most recent book, Thirty Times a Minute

“In her unique volume Kindling, artist, animal activist, and ethnographer Linnea Ryshke uses observational research to skillfully construct an empathetic space within which readers encounter animals who are essentially invisible in our culture: those raised for food. Ryshke was involved in the daily care of the animals up until their deaths. Through her poetry, she traces the path of her emotions, her attempts to make empathetic connections, and her own burn out and aversion as she exhausts her reservoirs of compassion navigating the inevitable path with these animals. Ryshke’s fearless willingness to turn toward death rather than away from it, her inclination to employ curiosity when confronted by ideologies so different from her own, and her attempts to establish a bridge of compassion with beings whose life experience she was powerless to change, all make this beautiful book a valuable companion for facing the challenges of our own provocative and demanding times. Blending art and ethnographic research, Kindling is an ideal addition to the animal studies, critical animal studies, art, literature, or ethics classroom.”—Julia Schlosser, lecturer in the Art department at California State University, Northridge and the curator for RememberingAnimals.art

Karavan Kitchen

A beautifully illustrated Middle Eastern vegan cookbook, an introduction to the cultures of the region, and an examination of the ongoing refugee crises.

Karavan Kitchen is a beautifully illustrated cookbook packed with delicious recipes for a wide range of vegan dishes throughout the Middle East—whether salads, mezze plates, main courses, the enormous variety of grains, sweet desserts, or beverages. Karavan Kitchen is also an evocative introduction to the many diverse cultures of the region and an eye-opening and compelling examination of the refugee crises caused by the conflicts in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. Soraya Beheshti demonstrates how food is often the central connection many refugees have to their native countries and a means of creating community even when forced to live in difficult conditions many miles from home.

Grief Is Love

Grief Is Love is quite simply a heaven-sent balm for broken hearts.
This short but powerful book takes you through the tragedy that is grief’s arrival and to its long reverberation on the rest of your life.

“The beginning of grief is overwhelming. Everything must stop as you attempt to absorb what has happened, which is impossible. You cannot fathom it. There is little to no comprehension at first. Instead, a pervasive numbness descends over your mind, body, and soul.”

In the space of eleven months, Jennifer Flowers lost her husband of thirty-three years and their son, Jonpaul. Grief bust her heart wide open. Grief Is Love is a hard-won, honest, and profoundly sensitive guide for anyone who has lost someone dear to them, and a companion as you move through the stages of grief.

Read an excerpt on our blog.

The Supremacist Syndrome

A careful and compelling examination of the human supremacism that underlies ideologies such as anti-Semitism, genocide, racism, misogyny, and cruelty to animals.

Proponents of human exceptionalism claim that only humans possess certain morally significant capacities, and as a result are entitled to be treated better than members of all other species. In the last fifty years, scientists have discovered how these capacities are shared by other species, which only raises the questions of how and why we evade responsibility for inhumane behavior, not only to animals but to one another. To answer these questions, Peter Marsh examines three different ideologies: ethnonationalist supremacism (the Holocaust in Hungary), racial supremacism (the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo), and gender-based supremacism (men’s treatment of women in Victorian and Edwardian England). He shows how supremacists applied mechanisms of moral disengagement to legitimize and evade personal responsibility for oppressing and exploiting members of a less-powerful group.

Marsh considers whether these different types of supremacism have common features and compares them to how we treat animals to examine whether that, too, causes unjustified harm to members of a weaker group and is wrong in the same way racism, sexism, and other supremacist ideologies are. Finally, he asks what we can do to overcome human supremacism and other supremacistideologies, providing practical examples of cross-cultural collaboration, humane education, veganism, and extending concepts of identity beyond borders of culture, race, and nation.

For more information, and to read excerpts of this book, visit the author’s website.

“In this absorbing, passionately argued, and deeply researched volume, independent scholar Peter Marsh examines the supremacist thinking that underlies the structures of oppression, and argues for equity, engagement, and reciprocity among peoples and in relationship to other animals.”—Jim Mason, author An Unnatural Order

Read an excerpt on our blog.

Kind

A collection of poems and images that reflect our complex relationship with other-than-human animals.

Kind is the kind of poetry book that makes you think differently about our world and the beings that inhabit it. Primack explores all facets of our lives with other beings—the beauty, the tragedy, and the absurdity that surrounds her existence. Kind cuts to one’s emotional core to make us think and feel.

“It is this poet’s calling to hold kindness and its opposite in tension. What is that opposite? The poems in this volume offer unsettling answers. With Gretchen Primack’s poems, the absence of kindness causes a quaking in our bodies. A lyrical language of the present tense evokes a fierce and tender impatience with what should never have been settled for.”—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat

“If it is true that one knows oneself best by observing how one treats others then this book of poems by Gretchen Primack is essential reading. Read these poems for the truth they tell about our relationship to and treatment of the creatures we take to be our property; read this book and ponder its many questions, for example ‘Who are the beasts?’ and ‘What can I do?’”—Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra

“How often does one get starstruck by a poet? When I read Gretchen Primack’s animal poems, I was starstruck instantly. How could someone crystallize my own feelings about animals and humanity so beautifully, so powerfully, and so poignantly? Primack seems only capable of writing poetry so damn good that you will find yourself wanting to read it aloud to everyone you know who shares your compassion for animals…and to everyone you know who doesn’t.”—Marisa Miller Wolfson, filmmaker of Vegucated

“Kind—an unassuming, everyday word, a word sprung from the Old English kin, meaning family—stitches this book together because each poem herein is an aching missive written to animals, poems of love and protest that refuse to bow down to our order of what is worthy and what is less than, to separate what is ‘born for love or commerce,’ to set apart what is human versus not. Each poem dissolves and reshapes these divisions with inexhaustible empathy and a ferocious determination that pleads— yea, even demands—kindness for all living beings.”—Nickole Brown, author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods

“Gretchen Primack knows that animals ‘cannot forget hell for even a day, and so [she] cannot either.’ She is infused with an abnormal amount of empathy, which fills her heart with kindness, awe, and hope. She wants to live ‘somewhere else, somewhere kind,’ so she spends her time shifting into that place where every being matters, and she takes us with her.”—Sharon Gannon, author of Magic is a Shift in Perception

Read an excerpt on our blog.

Brotha Vegan

Black vegan men discuss masculinity, sexuality, race, diet, health, fatherhood, social justice, animal rights, and the environment in this companion volume to Sistah Vegan.

In 2010, Lantern published Sistah Vegan: Black Women Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society, a landmark anthology edited by A. Breeze Harper that highlighted for the first time the diversity of vegan women of color’s response to gender, class, body image, feminism, spirituality, the environment, diet, and nonhuman animals. Now, a decade later, its companion volume, Brotha Vegan, unpacks the lived experience of Black men on veganism, fatherhood, politics, sexuality, gender, health, popular culture, spirituality, food, animal advocacy, the environment, and the many ways that veganism is lived and expressed within the Black community in the United States.

Edited by Omowale Adewale—founder of Black Vegfest, and one of the leading voices for racial and economic justice, animal rights, and black solidarity—Brotha Vegan includes interviews with and articles by folks such as Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, Doc (of Hip Hop is Green), chef Bryant Terry, physicians Anteneh Roba and Milton Mills, DJ Cavem, Stic of Dead Prez, Kimatni Rawlins, and many others. At once inspiring, challenging, and illuminating, Brotha Vegan illustrates the many ways it is possible to be vegan and reveals the leading edge of a “veganized” consciousness for social renewal.

Featuring:
Eric Adams—Baba Brother-D B. Aammaa Nubyahn—Michael Barber—Scott “Burnhard” Bernard—Ra-leek Born—Lord Cannon (a.k.a. LordMurkEl)—Anthony Carr—Fred “Doc” Beasley II—Jae Yahkèl Estes, XVX—Khnum “Stic” Ibomu—Kevin Jenkins—Malcolm Jones (malc)—Charles McCoy—Kezekial McWhinney-StLouis—Milton Mills, M.D.—Stewart Devon Mitchell—Brandon Morton—Mutulu Olugbala, a.k.a. M-1—Donald Peebles—Kimatni Rawlins—Anteneh Roba, M.D.—Richard W. Rogers Jr.—Bryant Terry—Donald Vincent (“Mr. Hip”)—Dr. Ietef “DJ Cavem” Vita—Torre Washington

Read an excerpt on our blog.

An Unnatural Order

A fully revised and updated version of the classic work on the origins of animal agriculture and our longstanding contempt for and hatred of nature and animals.

In 1993, Jim Mason, journalist, advocate, and pioneering figure in the contemporary animal advocacy movement, published An Unnatural Order—a sweeping overview of the origins of our destruction of the natural world and its creatures, from the dawn of agriculture to the present day. Now fully revised and updated to reflect greater awareness of, and urgency regarding, the climate crisis, An Unnatural Order offers an expansive overview of what has changed (both for good and for ill) and what has unfortunately remained the same.

His message is clear: until we grapple with the question of the animal, and our relationship with animality and the natural world, we will not be able to confront the consequences of our perpetuation of environmental destruction, biodiversity collapse, and our alienation from the Earth and one another. As brilliantly polemical and richly descriptive as it was when it was published almost three decades ago, this new version of An Unnatural Order is sure to excite a passionate debate about our role in either saving the ecosystems upon which all species (including our own) rely, or bringing it all to an end.

“Jim Mason’s classic work on the ancient origins of our wish to harm animals and others made a huge impact on me when I read it years ago. Now revised and updated, An Unnatural Order retains its power to provoke, inspire, and galvanize us toward action.”—Peter Marsh, author, The Supremacist Syndrome

“Mason’s slant on history—the human–animal orbit—is clever and subversive.”—Kirkus Reviews

“An eloquent, important plea for a total rethinking of our relationship to the animal world. Mason analyzes the West’s ‘dominionist’ worldview, which exalts humans as overlords and owners of other life. . . . His powerfully argued manifesto will change many readers’ attitudes toward hamburgers, animal experimentation, hunting, and circuses.”—Publishers Weekly

Read an excerpt on our blog.

Vegan Revolution

The global authority on Judaism and animal protection describes the grave challenges and exciting opportunities for repairing the world and saving the planet.

For over four decades, Richard Schwartz has engaged with two ethically rich ways of living that, as he charts in this book, he came to appreciate in middle age: Judaism and veganism. Having been born into a secular Jewish family, it was his marriage and an increasing commitment to social justice that propelled him to study and rediscover the essence of his Jewish faith. That sense of social justice further raised his awareness of the environmental movement, and, ultimately, led to animal rights and veganism.

In Vegan Revolution: Saving Our World, Revitalizing Judaism, Schwartz shows how, now perhaps more than ever, veganism offers a pathway for all of us of whatever faith (or no faith) to reduce hunger, conserve the environment, save water, reinstitute justice, and care for animals and the Earth. It is no coincidence, as Schwartz demonstrates, that many of these ideas are mandates in Jewish scripture, and that reincorporating a care for the world (tikkun olam) can itself reinvigorate the spirit of a faith and galvanize its practitioners to act.

“This pioneering book by Richard Schwartz, the world’s greatest living authority on the teachings of Judaism on protecting animals and nature, provides nothing short of the revolution in our way of thinking and acting that is now required in efforts to avert a climate catastrophe and other environmental disasters. This compelling, magisterial book is a must read. Its message must be heeded. Our future depends on it.”—Lewis Regenstein, author Replenish the Earth

“For those Jews positively inclined to consider a vegan diet, reading Schwartz’s book is like having a personal mentor.”—Jerusalem Post

“Schwartz is still trying to apply Jewish values to the basic arguments for veganism. But he has gone considerably beyond this now. He has incorporated quite a bit of material that is completely new—on cultivated meat, on climate change, on fish, on animal rights, and other topics. Even the subjects that were covered in the previous book [Judaism and Vegetarianism] have been reworked and completely updated.”—Keith Akers in Animals 24-7

“Vegan Revolution: Saving Our World, Revitalizing Judaism is thought-provoking and sure to interest Jewish people and anyone new to or considering vegan living.”—PETA Blog

“This is an inspirational book that not only helps people to become vegan but is very supportive of vegans already living this way. The deeper message of the book and the moral ethic of Torah teachings is that which is good for human health and spirit is also good for the health of the planet and all life thereupon. One of the most important points that Schwartz makes is that beyond all question the repair, the future, and the survival of the planet are strongly supported by the consciousness and practice of Torah-based veganism. This is an excellent book, which I strongly recommend to all those considering veganism as well as those who already are vegans.”—Rabbi Gabriel Cousens, Tikkun

“The Vegan Revolution was published at a most opportune time. With its emphasis on practical and spiritual ways to combine Judaism and Veganism to produce a real, long-lasting solution to climate change and other important issues, this volume is both timely, relevant and truly inspirational.”—Julie Rosenfeld, Jewish Vegetarian Society (UK)

“For vegan activists out there, understanding religious ideas, can be an additional method to promote their cause. For religious people, veganism can be another way to live their religious beliefs.”—Charles Stahler, Vegetarian Resource Group

“We highly recommend Vegan Revolution to everyone, for its extremely well documented references can help people to exchange their formerly distructive worldly ways back into the ways that God originally intended for us to live.”—Frank Hoffman, All-Creatures.org

Hidden

A collection of stunning images from some of the world’s leading photographers of animals in the human environment.

HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene is an unflinching book of photography about our conflict with non-human animals around the globe. HIDDEN shines a light on the invisible animals in our lives: those with whom we have a close relationship and yet fail to see. The animals we eat and wear; the animals we use for research, work, and for entertainment; the animals we sacrifice in the name of tradition and religion. HIDDEN is a historical document, a memorial, and an indictment of what is and should never again be.

Showcased by award-winning designer David Griffin, HIDDEN represents the work of over forty photojournalists who have documented—and continue to document—animal stories. Their exhaustive and in-depth work has resulted in some of the most compelling and historic images of animals ever seen. Among them are (in alphabetical order): Aaron Gekoski, Aitor Garmendia, Amy Jones, Andrew Skowron, Britta Jaschinski, Daniel Beltrá, Francesco Pistilli, Joan de la Malla, Jo-Anne McArthur, Jose Valle, Kelly Guerin, Kristo Muurimaa, Konrad Lozinski, Louise Jorgensen, Luis Tato, Paul Hilton, Sabine Grootendorst, Selene Magnolia, Stefano Belacchi, Tamara Kenneally, and Timo Stammberger.

“The photojournalists featured in HIDDEN have entered some of the darkest, most unsettling places in the world. The images they have captured are a searing reminder of our unpardonable behavior towards animals and will serve as beacons of change for years to come.”—Joaquin Phoenix, actor

“I am, quite simply, in awe of these photographers. In a way, they are like war photographers, except witness to a war that so many people choose to suppress that exists. This takes enormous inner strength and bloody-minded determination, because they cannot save any of the animals that they photograph; they can only hope that their photos will help illuminate the mass extermination that unfolds every second of every day across the planet. To me, they are heroes. Not just for one day, but over and over and over again.”—Nick Brandt, photographer