100 books like The Dreaded Comparison

As one of the founders of the field of modern genocide studies, I’m still learning; it is still a relatively new discipline, having been started in the late 1970s;  in fact, the first organization on genocide was founded in only 1994, just 30 years ago, the IAGS, the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

It took a long time to create a textbook; most of the earlier books were anthologies like my own book, and textbooks may not be the most titillating of books to read but the best one is by my Canadian colleague Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, second edition.

Jones is not only a good writer but also a photographer. There are dozens of good books and good writers dealing with genocide; a reader might want to consider books by Samantha Power, Timothy Snyder, Martin Shaw, Helen Fein, and Israel Charny.

It’s a gruesome topic but handled… show more.

In my own work, I draw extensively on the lynching to document and analyze racial dehumanization. From the time of the collapse of reconstruction during the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century, thousands of African Americans, most of them men, were murdered by white mobs. If you are like most people, you think of lynching as nothing more than extrajudicial execution, but in fact it often involved hours of the most hideous torture imaginable, ending with the victim being burned alive before a crowd of hundreds or even thousands of avid spectators. Philip Dray’s book is a fine entry point into the historical literature on lynching.

There is surprisingly little research literature dealing specifically with dehumanization outside of academic papers by social psychologists. But this state of affairs is changing, as more and more scholars recognize that understanding this harrowing phenomenon is crucial for the future of humanity. This unique volume, with contributions from thirty scholars from a whole range of academic disciplines, provides an excellent snapshot of the vibrant state of dehumanization studies today.

Many people are unaware that the Nazi genocide of Jews and Roma was built on their earlier mass extermination of disabled people, beginning with children. The killing methods used in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka were pioneered in the murder of many thousands of people with physically and mentally disabled people, whom members of the German medical profession referred to as “life unworthy of life” and “useless eaters.” This book by a distinguished Holocaust scholar meticulously documents the journey from the first child killed on Hitler’s orders to the inferno of the Polish extermination camps.

This first book in Kelle Riley’s new series has it all—a plot full of twists and turns, a super-smart sleuth, and just a smidge of romance. I love that the sleuth doesn't act impulsively and instead observes and deduces. In addition, there are yummy recipes, a cranky rescue cat, and several quirky secondary characters. I especially like the couple who own a dog bakery and their trained dog that discourages the goose population.

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is usually taken to be the founding philosophical text for the animal rights movement, but I think Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights presents the more compelling, more multi-dimensional argument.

Where Singer grounds moral standing in the fundamental interest in avoiding suffering, Regan foregrounds the “inherent value” of being the “experiencing subject of a life,” for whom avoiding suffering is only part of the question.

There’s plenty of disagreement about whether the rights framework is the best way to think about our moral duties to animals (cf. Derrida above). And Regan’s position is available in less rigorous and scholarly form in some of his other books. But for the full walk-through of the best argument for animal rights, this is the text.

I found this to be a hard list to put together because there are so many excellent books on animal history--on any given day I could have presented a completely different list. However, this was the one book that absolutely had to be on my list. Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights was the book that started me on this journey. I first encountered this book when I was a grad student, and it has shaped my thinking on animal history in many important ways over the years. Animals and concerns for their welfare have always been important to me in my personal life, but I hadn’t thought about incorporating human-animal histories into my scholarship until I read this book. It was a real game-changer for me. This is a very good introduction to some of the shifts in thinking that took place regarding relationships between humans and nonhuman animals in Britain… show more.

Slavery used to be the economic engine of the Americas. Only a few could clearly see that keeping other humans in bondage was a horrible crime. Ingrid Newkirk has a similar clarity of vision when it comes to animal rights. I believe that in the future, most of us look back with horror at industrial husbandry and the use of hormones to cultivate ever larger beasts for the slaughterhouse. You may not entirely agree with Newkirk, but you have to take her seriously. She’s also a genius at publicizing her cause of animal rights, helping to popularize veganism and the banning of fur and leather products as well as many kinds of animal research.

For those who want to learn more about the meaning and history of animal rights, this is one of the most informative books I’ve read on the rise of the American animal welfare and animal rights movements. Even if you don’t agree with everything in these pages, you’ll come away with a new appreciation of the struggles to protect dogs, cats, and other animals in our modern society.

Quit Monks or Die! is something else indeed. It’s a mystery novel and a good one. It is set, yes! in academia, where a scientist and a graduate assistant are both found murdered. The scientist was working on an experiment involving monkeys. Does that have to do with why he was killed? Its cracker-jack plot, which involves animal rights, is complex but lucidly and expertly laid out. It's not just who done it, but what was done? This is not Kumin’s only novel but I believe it’s her only mystery.