Martha Nussbaum Recommends ‘Fear Factory’
The Best Scholarly Books of 2023
Happy New Year, dear readers of The Review! As we do each year, we convened a group of our contributors — a dozen, this time around — and asked them which works of scholarship surprised, challenged, thrilled, or impressed them most in 2023. (In a few cases, these books were published in 2022, or even 2021 — but who are we to quibble?) The selections were typically eclectic, covering a range of subjects and locales, from punk clubs in Mexico to avant-garde film festivals in Uzbekistan.
One theme that emerged, in this year of turbulent academic and international politics, was political upheaval: We got detailed new accounts of historical revolutions in England, Haiti, and South America, as well as meditations on failed political projects and the lessons we can learn from disappointment and decline.
Whatever your interests, there should be something to entice and engross you on the list that follows. See you next year!
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The Cruelty Industry
By Martha Nussbaum
I warmly recommend Matthew Scully’s new book, Fear Factories: Arguments About Innocent Creatures and Merciless People (Arezzo Books, 2023). Scully is a superb writer whose earlier book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, written from his experience as a Republican speechwriter with access to concocted “wild animal hunts” using illegally imported prey, enabled him to sound a clear alarm about callous and cruel hunting practices. Now he turns his laser vision on the factory-farming industry, with devastating arguments. Everyone should read this book and judge accordingly.
Martha Nussbaum is a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education