In Editor's Choice this week, we highlight Corban Addison's Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial, a work of nonfiction about the environmental harms perpetuated by industrial hog farming and a North Carolina town's efforts to hold these operations accountable.
We also look at the 13 Things Book Clubs Look For When Picking Books. Plus, take our personality quiz to find out what kind of reader you are and check out the latest book news.
With best wishes,
Davina Morgan-Witts
BookBrowse Publisher
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Wastelands
by Corban Addison
Review and article by Elisabeth Herschbach
Growing up in eastern North Carolina in the 1950s, Elsie Herring reveled in the rustic beauty of the surrounding countryside—a pine-fringed sweep of plains dotted with small farms. But when she returned in the early 1990s after several decades away, Elsie found her childhood home transformed. A noxious stench in the air made sitting outside unbearable. Flies swarmed the yard, and buzzards circled overhead. Noisy trucks screeched by at all hours of the day and night, shattering the peace. Worse yet, a foul spray would periodically rain down on her house—liquefied hog waste from the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, that had been established on neighboring land in her absence.
Wastelands tells the story of the protracted struggle of Elsie and hundreds of other residents in her community to fight back and force factory farms to clean up their act. When years of activism led nowhere, community members finally took their case to court in 2013, prompting a high-stakes legal battle that dragged on for five years, pitting the plaintiffs and their legal team against powerful moneyed interests, the pork industry's slick propaganda machine, a corporate intimidation campaign and a political system rigged against them. ... continued
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Beyond the Book: The Harms of Industrial Hog Farming in North Carolina
Discussions of factory farming typically focus on animal welfare issues - with good reason. Confined in abysmal conditions for the entirety of their lives, pigs in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are crowded in unsanitary indoor pens of hard metal and concrete, sometimes thousands to a single barn. Unable to freely roam or graze on open land, they are mechanically fed and watered, pumped full of antibiotics to combat the diseases that spread in their cramped quarters and shipped off to slaughter at six months old, never having seen the light of day.
But CAFOs are more than just an animal rights issue. The massive scale of these operations and the industrial methods used to run them are responsible for unsustainable levels of waste and pollution that degrade neighboring communities, harm the environment and pose a public health risk.
Untreated wastewater from CAFOs - a toxic brew of animal feces, urine and blood, antibiotic residues, growth hormones, heavy metals and harmful bacteria - seeps into water sources, contaminating drinking water, and overflows into rivers and streams when it floods. Ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and other hazardous pollutants poison the air. ... continued
Visit BookBrowse for full review, excerpt, Beyond the Book article and more.
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Quiz: What's Your Reading Personality? |
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What kind of reader are you?
Find out now by taking BookBrowse's fun, fast and not to be taken too seriously quiz. Seven questions in all.
Compare your results with friends!
Question 1. You've got an hour to spend in the bookstore/library, where do you start?
- Chat with the bookstore staff to find out what they recommend.
- Check out my favorite authors to see if there's anything new.
- An hour in the bookstore - in my dreams!
- Bounce around from section to section browsing whatever looks good.
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The 13 Things Book Clubs Look For When Picking Books |
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This blog was first published in 2019.
For our 2019 report, The Inner Lives of Book Clubs, BookBrowse conducted two surveys of a total of more than 5,000 book club participants. This report--in conjunction with our 15 years of research into book clubs and readers in general (during which time we've surveyed over 20,000 people)--has given us new, data-driven insights into how book clubs function and what they want from the books they read.
While 70% of book clubs read fiction most of the time, the book selection process has less to do with a book's genre and more to do with its attributes, with most book clubs open to reading a wide range of genres as long as the books allow for deep discussion.
So, according to the data, what do book clubs actually look for in the books they pick? ... continued
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Solve our Wordplay puzzle to reveal a well-known expression, and be entered to win the book of your choice or a 6-month membership to BookBrowse!
"T E B Catches T W"
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The answer to the last Wordplay: T O Thing W H T F I F I
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"
Meaning: We can accomplish great things if we look at problems face on rather than being held back by doubt and fear.
Franklin D. Roosevelt made this expression famous in his 1933 inaugural address:
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
Most of Roosevelt's speech was written by Columbia University Professor Raymond Moly but it is believed that this part of the speech was not in the original, or at least not in this form. Some say that the writing of Henry David Thoreau inspired Roosevelt to add the "fear itself" line. ... continued
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