Dead Meat [Hardcover]

Sue Coe (Author), Alexander Cockburn (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1996

A nationally prominent, politically oriented artist offers an unsparingly critical view of the meat industry in scores of illustrations, documenting the skewing, flaying, dismembering, castrating, debeaking, electrocuting, and decapitating of animals. Simultaneous. IP.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

British artist Sue Coe is well known for her social and political paintings and illustrations, which appear regularly in such publications as the New York Times and the New Yorker. Her latest effort is the disturbing book Dead Meat, a visual record of Coe's visits to 40 slaughterhouses, cattle ranches, and hatcheries to document the grisly practices of the meat-packing industry. Although she was not allowed to photograph on the premises, she was permitted to draw and sketch, and much of this work is jarringly graphic. Incorporated with the artwork are her thoughts and observations laid out in diary form. Even if you don't agree with Coe's politics, this is social and political art at its most powerful, in the tradition of Goya, Daumier, and Rockwell Kent.

From Publishers Weekly

Political artist Coe spent years visiting slaughterhouses and meat farms in the U.S., Canada and England, all the while drawing and writing about what she saw. The result is a fascinating and revealing portrait of the institutions behind the meat we eat. Coe's illustrations, which appear regularly in such publications as the New York Times and the New Yorker, have the sharply lined, affecting realism of a Diego Rivera mural. Her first-person account is matter-of-fact, thoughtful and engaging. Coe's book is political, and she clearly hopes it will make readers think twice about what they put into their mouths, but she does not preach and is unafraid to confront her own complicity: "Every dollar I get drips with blood too," she writes. Her empathetic rendering of the workers she encounters is reminiscent of Studs Terkel at his best, and the parallels she draws between society's treatment of meat animals and its working classes are disturbing and convincing. Cockburn's introductory essay traces the history of the meat industry with his customary shrewd sociopolitical insight, but without falling into polemics. Dead Meat will appeal not just to those interested in animal rights, but to anyone who cares about how society functions.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows; First Edition edition (February 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568580509
• ISBN-13: 978-1568580500
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,383,682 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truth is more shocking than fiction, November 29, 1999

By 

M. Archer (Paris) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dead Meat (Paperback)

I received this book as a gift yesterday and stayed up all night reading it and finished it. Luckily, I did not have any nightmares about animals being treated in the way in which Sue Coe describes and paints in this revealing book. I recommend this book to the world; everyone should be aware of the way we treat animals, from pumping them with chemicals and slaughtering them with a knife as they hang from a back foot, to eating them on our dinner tables. The people of the world need to have this information so that they can consciously make a decision about how they can change their contibution regarding these crimes which occur on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis in every part of the world.

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars incredible book, December 29, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dead Meat (Paperback)

This book was the reason I became a vegetarian.

While it's easy to skim lightly over even a well-presented and passionate text such as Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" without understanding the true horror of the meat that you eat, you can't so easily dismiss this book's drawings. They are blunt truths: rather than appealing to your reason, they speak directly to your decency. That makes their argument impossible to ignore.

If you are a meat-eater, you should be afraid to read "Dead Meat," because it will force you to understand the horrible process that turns a life into the food on your plate. But don't let that fear stop you from reading it- you shouldn't fear the book, you should fear the facts that it presents but that tragically exist quite independently of it.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Horrifying personal account of the meat industry., July 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dead Meat (Paperback)

Another horrifying book, this time about the animal food industry. An excellent introduction by Tom Regan points out the effects of the meat industry and the killing of nonhuman animals on the environment, on the human psyche, on social settings. Meat metaphors shape us at the most subcellular level of our awareness of the world. Christians methaphorically eat the flesh of Christ. Nazis use animal methaphors in order to justify their oppression of the Jews and other groups. Men use animal imagery to objectify women. Sue's artwork is fairly stylized but disarming. If you can see it in person, you should. It's a nightmare. There's no way to justify the oppression of so many nonhuman animals, especially because alternatives exist to almost everything for which humans use animals. Imagine if her artwork were photographs instead. She shows us disemboweled pigs, de-beaked chickens, whipped horses. These are linked to our everyday reality, for instance in her painting McWorld. Another interesting theme, rendered less explicitly, is the connection between the interlocked oppression of nonhuman animals by humans and women by men. For instance, an advertisement on the side of a truck packed with hogs for slaughter parked at the Thorn Apple Valley Slaughterhouse in Detroit, Michigan shows dancing pigs in skirts and reads GO GO GIRL EXPRESS. This sexualization of animals for slaughter and the meatification of women for sex is everpresent.