BiblioVault - Books about Lives

Personalities on the Plate

The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat

Barbara J. King

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In recent years, scientific advances in our understanding of animal minds have led to major changes in how we think about, and treat, animals in zoos and aquariums. The general public, it seems, is slowly coming to understand that animals like apes, elephants, and dolphins have not just brains, but complicated inner and social lives, and that we need to act accordingly.

Yet that realization hasn’t yet made its presence felt to any great degree in our most intimate relationship with animals: at the dinner table. Sure, there are vegetarians and vegans all over, but at the same time, meat consumption is up, and meat remains a central part of the culinary and dining experience for the majority of people in the developed world.

With Personalities on the Plate, Barbara King asks us to think hard about our meat eating--and how we might reduce it. But this isn’t a polemic intended to convert readers to veganism. What she is interested in is why we’ve not drawn food animals into our concern and just what we do know about the minds and lives of chickens, cows, octopuses, fish, and more. Rooted in the latest science, and built on a mix of firsthand experience (including entomophagy, which, yes, is what you think it is) and close engagement with the work of scientists, farmers, vets, and chefs, Personalities on the Plate is an unforgettable journey through the world of animals we eat. Knowing what we know--and what we may yet learn--what is the proper ethical stance toward eating meat? What are the consequences for the planet? How can we life an ethically and ecologically sound life through our food choices?

We could have no better guide to these fascinatingly thorny questions than King, whose deep empathy embraces human and animal alike. Readers will be moved, provoked, and changed by this powerful book.

[more]

Power and Everyday Life

The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Dias, Maria Odila Silva

Rutgers University Press, 1995

This important new work is a study of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. Full of vivid detail, the book concentrates on the lives of working women--black, white, Indian, mulatta, free, freed, and slaves, and their struggles to survive. Drawing on official statistics, and on the accounts of travelers and judicial records, the author paints a lively picture of the jobs, both legal and illegal, that were performed by women. Her research leads to some surprising discoveries, including the fact that many women were the main providers for their families and that their work was crucial to the running of several urban industries. This book, which is a unique record of women’s lives across social and race strata in a multicultural society, should be of interest to students and researchers in women’s studies, urban studies, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

[more]

Power and Everyday Life

The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Dias, Maria Odila Silva

Rutgers University Press, 1995

This important new work is a study of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. Full of vivid detail, the book concentrates on the lives of working women--black, white, Indian, mulatta, free, freed, and slaves, and their struggles to survive. Drawing on official statistics, and on the accounts of travelers and judicial records, the author paints a lively picture of the jobs, both legal and illegal, that were performed by women. Her research leads to some surprising discoveries, including the fact that many women were the main providers for their families and that their work was crucial to the running of several urban industries. This book, which is a unique record of women’s lives across social and race strata in a multicultural society, should be of interest to students and researchers in women’s studies, urban studies, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

[more]

Private Theatricals

The Lives of the Victorians

Nina Auerbach

Harvard University Press, 1990

"Everyman" as actor on life's stage has been a recurrent theme in popular literature--epecially persuasive in these times of powerful electronic media, celebrity hype, and professional image-makers--but the great Victorians exuded sincerity. Nina Auerbach reminds us that all lives can be subversive performances. Charting the notable impact of the theater and theatricality on the Victorian imagination, she provocatively reexamines the concept of sincerity and authenticity as literary ideal.

In novels, popular fiction, and biographies, Auerbach unveils the theatrical element in lives imagined and represented. Focusing on three major points in the life cycle--childhood, passage to maturity, and death--she demonstrates how the process of living was for Victorians the acting of a role; only dying generated a creature with an "own self." Her discussion draws not only on theater history, but on demonology-the ghosts and monsters so much a part of the nineteenth-century imagination.

Nina Auerbach has written a closely reasoned and stimulating book for everyone interested in the Victorian age, and everyone interested in theatricality---whether private or on the stage.

[more]