Book reviews: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals & Danielle Clode’s The Future in Flames

High-quality nonfiction tackling diverse topics:

• Jonathan Safran Foer, a scintillating novelist, has turned to nonfiction, a comprehensive work of journalistic investigation and polemics. Eating Animals tackles modern factory farming which dominates American meat production. We all know the factories in which pigs, chickens, turkeys and (less so) cows are grotesquely bred, abused and slaughtered. No one can say they don’t know but of course the human condition is to accept. Until a passionate lyrical stylist comes along to penetrate our languor . . . Foer has written a classic for our times. He advocates vegetarianism and also meat farming ethical uplifts – I for one am convinced. A must for every consumer of meat. 4½ stars
• The ‘Black Saturday’ fires in February last year have prompted an avalanche of dissecting words, but not until I read Danielle Clode’s The Future in Flames did I realize how politicized the debate is, between ‘tree clearers’ and their opponents, between environmentalists and Australian conservatives, between climate change deniers and doomsayers, between blamers of many hues. Clode combines fascinating, painstaking research with personal views from a bushfire-exposed home. Her incisive, sensible analysis is just what the bushfire debate needs, especially as global warming ratchets up the likelihood of major events. A must read. 3½ stars