Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism

 Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism by Mark Hawthorne

2010

Weight: 12.8 oz

Method of Disposal: Donating

To think, I have been carrying this book around all this time, and it is essentially PETA propaganda.  I cannot think of an animal rights group that has less of my support, despite our common disdain for factory farms, research with live animals, and other animal abuse.  Their tactics have made them a laughing stock and made animal rights activist everywhere look bad.  Not to mention, their open disdain for no-kill shelters, which goes directly against the work I have been doing the last 14 years.  They could not be more wrong about what no-kill looks like to me.  In addition to that, Best Friends is well on the road to proving them wrong on a large scale.  Given, they will never see it that way, because they would rather see an animal euthanized than to be adopted out as a companion animal to most people.  Always out for the shock value and getting news coverage, they will do all sorts, like boycott Jimmy Carter for fishing, send naked women to protest in the streets, petition to change "ham lake" to "yam lake," and show you graphic, brutal pictures to scare you into doing the right thing.  

A lot of people seem to like this book and, if I could manage to step back from hating how often PETA is used as an example and/or cited, I guess I could see that some of it might be useful for a completely green, young person, who has not yet done any activism or been to any protests.  Within this book, there is an incredibly basic introduction to civil disobedience.  In that way, it is a touch useful.

Either way, to each their own.  I am donating it because everyone has the right to choose how and who they want to engage with and, God knows, we do need more animal rights' activists.  The things we do to animals in our society (and in almost every society) are deplorable and overwhelmingly sad.  We are brutal and, with factory farms in particular, we are worse than heartless.  We are cruel and inhumane torturers.  I know THAT sentence makes me sound like PETA but, in that case, it is true.  The people at those facilities are also treated terribly so it is should be no surprise that the animals are.

Women and Aids

 Women and Aids by Jane Richardson
1988
Weight: 7 ounces
Method of Disposal: Donating

This book is extremely dated at this point, but it was interesting to read for so many reasons.  Living through the start of AIDS and the start of COVID would have been wildly different for so many reasons, but, having lived as an adult during the time of a pandemic, there are certain things I feel like I was more attuned to or attentive to now.  Not just the fear and the unknown, but the attempt and the struggle to manage people's reactions and to preserve a sense of humanity.  The constant reassurance that we can all still care for each other and that our fear should not make us react with hatred.  It should not make us ostracize sick people.  

Another thing I found interesting was reading this and knowing the strides we have made sense AIDS blew up on the scene in the 80's.  I could fill in some of the missing gaps in information and answer some questions.  Some things I had to Google, and I learned that way.  In other areas, I was sad to know that there were still so many things happening then that are still happening now.  The author was seemingly a compassionate person who recognized homophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, when possible, and that was much appreciated.

All in all, this was a quality book.  It was clearly more useful when it was written than it is now, but it is an excellent layout for how to write a sensitive, helpful guide on a virus that people do not know much about.