New Books
Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do? by Michael Sandel
What are our obligations to others as people in a free society? Should government tax the rich to help the poor? Is the free market fair? Is it sometimes wrong to tell the truth? Is killing sometimes morally required? Is it possible, or desirable, to legislate morality? Do individual rights and the common good conflict?
Greenberg, Michael. Illness and Intimacy. The New York Times. 12 November 2009.
Nothing Was The Same: a Memoir, by Kay Redfield Jamison
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review
In her new book, “Nothing Was the Same,” Jamison makes it clear that coming clean about her illness was a personal necessity, the release of an internal pressure that she could no longer hide. “Silence about mental illness bred a quiet ugliness and set in place the conditions for unnecessary suffering and death,” she writes. “I had studied and written about depression and bipolar illness for 20 years. . . . If I couldn’t be public about it, it was scarcely reasonable to hope that others would.”
Schuessler, Jennifer. Mau-Mauing the Flesh Eaters. The New York Times. 13 November 2009.
Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review
For Jonathan Safran Foer, there’s nothing sexy about a dead pig. He’s a committed vegetarian, and he hopes that by the end of EATING ANIMALS (Little, Brown, $25.99) you will be, too. Within weeks of meeting, he and his wife (the novelist Nicole Krauss) were sharing qualms about meat. After their son was born, they gave it up entirely. But there remained the problem of the rest of the world, still waging “war” against animals, one factory-farmed burger at a time.
