Customer Reviews

Why Look at Animals?. John Berger (Great Ideas)

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This book, another in the Penguin "Great Ideas" series, charmed me unexpectedly. Like all the books in the series, it is (appealingly?) short* (100 pages), but the quality of the writing more than compensates for its brevity.

Perhaps shamefully, I had never heard of John Berger before stumbling across this collection of his work. A little googling points to a fairly extensive body of work, which I look forward to exploring further. The book comprises eight essays, one poem, and a concluding vignette of the philosopher Ernst Fischer, a personal friend of the author. As the title essay suggests, most of the pieces deal with the relationship between humans and animals; they range from the gently playful "A Mouse Story" (a man, a mousetrap, and several murine protagonists), to more elegaic pieces such as "The White Bird" and "Field", both of which use the commonplace (a wooden bird carved by a peasant of the Haute Savoie, a field near the author's home) as starting point for more general rumination on aesthetics. The poem "They are the Last" is a surprisingly moving appreciation of cows. Perhaps because of the quality of the writing, each of these pieces has a low-key charm which I enjoyed thoroughly.

But the meat of the book (no pun intended) lies in the three longer essays: "Why Look at Animals?", "Ape Theatre", and "The Eaters and the Eaten", which, taken together, provide a thoughtful, unexpectedly engrossing, investigation of the relationship between humans and animals. Although Berger's purpose is undoubtedly didactic, precisely what I found appealing about these essays is the lack of any kind of preaching tone. In contrast to, say, someone like Peter Singer, whose general air of moral superiority I personally find completely offputting, and whose preachy tone diminishes the cogency of his arguments, Berger's approach is far more low-key. And because of that, more effective, at least for this reader. Whereas the extremity of some of Singer's arguments just makes me fling him aside after a while, Berger writes with a sly charm that is beguiling, with the result that I found these essays thought-provoking, and not easily dismissed.

Which, I imagine, would please the author. I did not expect to like this collection of essays nearly as much as I did. Try them for yourself - you might feel the same way.


*: I think the marketing folks at Penguin are quite smart - they know full well that a 300-page volume that advertised itself as containing "great ideas" would be a tough sell. Whereas the slim volumes that they have assembled are actually pretty appealing, even if some (Orwell's essay on "Books v Cigarettes" or on "The Decline of the English Murder", for example), though not without a certain charm, seem to stretch the definition of "great ideas" more than a little

Berger never wastes a word. I have been a devotee of his since the early 70s and caught most of the essays included in this slim volume, elsewhere. But this is an inspired packaging by the people at Penguin for their Great Ideas series. The title piece alone is insightful enough to warrant a re-read. Ape Theatre, the marvellous contemplation on aesthetics in, White Bird; The Eaters and the Eaten, on consumer society...all these hang together, even intercept. He is a writer of great elegance and will brook no casual reading. This is a good place to get acquainted with the master and an excellent gift for a friend.