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Reviews tagging 'Suicide'
We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer
35 reviews
festive_fossil's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
This is one of the best books I've ever read. It was not at all what I was expecting. I thought this was going to be like documentaries I have watched on climate change or industrial animal agriculture where there are a lot of hard facts and some emotional appeals. This book had those, too, but it was also philosophical, an inner journey of the author trying to understand his own apathy over something he knows definitively is an existential threat. This was an emotional one for me because it hit so close to home, perfectly articulating the cognitive dissonance of knowing you can, in fact, do something to halt climate change and yet...not doing what is necessary. This set of essays (I hesitate to use narrative for the whole) tips back and forth between despair and hope and leaves you only with the knowledge that we can only do this collectively. I just finished this today so my thoughts are still scattered, but I will be reading through a second time and may be able to update this review with more. However, what I can say is that I will be recommending this to everyone I know.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Genocide and Suicide
bekah445's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty
Moderate: Antisemitism, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, and Animal death
kelsiejade's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
linneamorgan_14's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
I think this is a good read for anyone who says they care about climate change and/or is considering cutting back on their consumption of animal products. Puts a lot of things into perspective in terms of how what we eat influences the climate and makes a very compelling case for significantly cutting down on our consumption of animal products.
A couple things that didn’t sit quite right with me (potential spoilers?):
- At one point, there is a discussion about overpopulation but there is no discussion until later on in the book about how the communities and countries that we (the west) blame overpopulation on are the ones with the lowest carbon footprint. Doesn’t sit quite right.
- The author is transparent about when he has “cheat days”, which I think is important for people to realize are ok, especially if allowing yourself occasional cheat days makes a veg/vegan diet more sustainable for you. However, the way he goes about it makes it seem like being veg/vegan is this super difficult thing, which might put people off. This might be something nit picky on my end though.
- Lastly, the book emphasizes individual action as the best way to fight climate change, but it feels like the author dismisses the action that big corporations need to take to help solve this problem (which, in a sense, fair since that isn’t the focus of the book).
A couple things that didn’t sit quite right with me (potential spoilers?):
- At one point, there is a discussion about overpopulation but there is no discussion until later on in the book about how the communities and countries that we (the west) blame overpopulation on are the ones with the lowest carbon footprint. Doesn’t sit quite right.
- The author is transparent about when he has “cheat days”, which I think is important for people to realize are ok, especially if allowing yourself occasional cheat days makes a veg/vegan diet more sustainable for you. However, the way he goes about it makes it seem like being veg/vegan is this super difficult thing, which might put people off. This might be something nit picky on my end though.
- Lastly, the book emphasizes individual action as the best way to fight climate change, but it feels like the author dismisses the action that big corporations need to take to help solve this problem (which, in a sense, fair since that isn’t the focus of the book).
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide
schnorriwiebli's review against another edition
tense
slow-paced
2.0
This was a deeply frustrating read. Even recognising I wasn't the target audience for this book, as my diet is already mostly plant-based anyway, the text drowns in the multitude of allegories employed to describe (fighting against) the climate crisis, as well as in the author's own internal dialogue. It's lengthy, imprecise, neither particularly informative nor very inspiring. This book spends so much of its time discussing how we should think about the climate crisis; time we could otherwise spend acting.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide
Holocaust imagery/references/comparisons, fairly frequent, varying in detail.
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