Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic (Flashpoint) [Kindle Edition]

Mark Mathew Braunstein (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a rare, inimitable book, one to savor and turn to, time and again.... It is thick with thought.... The poetic and pregnant ponderables make this guide to higher consciousness unique in the history of vegetarian literature. --Vegetarian Times (added by author)

Thick with thought, this literary feast ... is vegetarianism's most eloquent and original voice.  --Vegetarian Voice (added by author)

One of the best books on vegetarianism, it is exceptionally well written and carefully reasoned. --The Trumpeter: Journal of Eco-Philosophy (added by author)

A refreshing and stimulating alternative to the plethora of mundane diet books. --Healthful Living (added by author)

A remarkably intelligent book. --The Washington Post

Radical Vegetarianism is a feast of words.... If vegetarianism has its cult classic, this is it. --Animals Agenda

Now fully revised and updated for a new millennium, Braunstein’s words should be required reading. Veg pioneer Scott Nearing proposed that if your thinking is one step ahead of the masses, you are perceived a leader; two steps, you’re considered dangerous. RADICAL VEGETARIANISM was three steps ahead when first written, and still is. It’s just as meaningful today as it was in 1981, if not more so. –- Veg News

Product Description

This is the vegetarian dialectic of diet and ethic: not coincidentally, but absolutely essentially, those foods that deprive the fewest lives of others contribute to the longest lives for ourselves. (from the preface)
Vegetarians are not a better sort of people, just a better sort of carnivore, writes Braunstein in Radical Vegetarianism, and carnivores are just a better sort of cannibal. In this updated edition of the 1981 classic, Braunstein courageously takes on the canned canards, sacred cows, and wooly thinking of carnivores and vegetarians alike, and proposes a vegetarianism that goes beyond the stereotypes of pot-lucks and Birkenstocks to one that embraces contradiction and candor, or, as Braunstein says (channeling the Ancients), Gnaw Thyself.

Contents:
Nutrition in the Light of Vegetarianism
Ashes to Ashes, Life to Life
Letter to a Young Vegetarian
Traveling Fast
The Milky Way
Animals and Infidels
Carnivoral Death and Karmic Debt
The Illogic of the Ecologic
The Problem of Being a Flesh Eater
An Apologetic Addendum

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1527 KB
• Print Length: 200 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1590561511
• Publisher: Lantern Books (November 30, 1980)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0036FTOL2
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #384,226 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

Born too soon, I probably will die too late. Until that inevitable end, believing neither in afterlife nor aftershave, I aspire to spend the rest of my life as a very hairy and very healthy corpse. That should suffice as my life's story, a short story.

Want to know more? If so, now there's no stopping me. Am a Leo, and I can't help it, I was born that way. Am a college fine arts academic now bored by the arts, a nature photographer who seeks to shoot the sunrise at risk of being blinded, and an instructor of Photoshop which helps me make my nature photos look more like nature and less like photos. My handheld-camera self-portrait was photo'd August 2007 and was not photoshopped to make me look thinner or younger or just plain better. You be the judge whether I present the picture of health. If you think I look 10 years younger than my age, then try to imagine that even at the age of 9 I looked 10 years younger than my age. During my search for eternal youth, I have written books and articles with the intent to save the world, though I'm now content to save my breathe. Was a Cub Sprout who grew up into a Boy Sprout and wilderness backpacker, backwoods mountain biker, near-marathon runner, and more-than-mile swimmer. But now that I am a Man Sprout, I am permanently crippled by a sports injury, and probably pickled by nearby nuke plant radioactivity, to which might be attributed others' misshapen bodies and my misconceived thoughts. Family, friends and lovers shape our thoughts and our lives. Mine also are influenced by my animal neighbors in a nature preserve where I live, and by the books which I read. I've studied both Testaments of the Bible, and the tenets of Buddhism and Shinto. Add to my reader's dossier the nearly entire oeuvres of way too many Eurocentric dead white males, for instance Melville and Whitman, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Rilke and Leopardi, Kafka and Borges, Cioran and Beckett, Plato and Socrates, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and my guru and mentor and doctor Seuss, to name some whose rhymes and rants I somehow survived without going crazy, but also without growing wise. I've also read more than a lioness's share of women writers too, just not anyone who has changed my life, say the way Socrates and Plato did, who taught me for instance that poverty is measured not by how little one owns, but by how much one wants. So while I want to foster happiness in our individual lives, I want more to inspire reverence for the planet upon which our meager lives depend. Consequently my own greatest inspirations are the writings of Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, and Edward Abbey, especially Abbey's Fool's Progress and Desert Solitaire, both which I've cried over and read twice over, the second times chapter-by-chapter backwards, after all according to Kierkegaard, Life is Lived Forwards but Understood Backwards. In deference to and defense of Mother Earth, I've never wanted to father a child, nor have I ever fathered an unwanted child. And though I like cats and dogs, I can't bring myself to bring home dead animals from the slaughterhouse to feed to live ones in the doghouse. Calves and lambs and kids and piglets are cuddly animals too, which is why since age 15 I have not eaten them, nor since age 19 drank the milk their mothers intended for them. I wonder what people mean when they espouse their love for animals, yet they love them also for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Also I do not eat white flour or white sugar or take pharmaceutical drugs or drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, but I do unabashedly smoke medical marijuana, medicinally for below the waist, and recreationally for above. I am merely human, so certainly not a god. I believe in all of the gods, but none of the religions, especially not Western religions, whose pages of history are stained with the blood of infidels and animals. Born a Judeo-Buddhist atheist, I now am an eco-pagan pantheist. I am not religious, but if I were religious, I would be a Carthusian or Zen monk, except for my being incurably and heretically heterosexual, and except for my being more zany than holy. Am a former island resident of the nuthouse called Manhattan, where same as most of its residents I too was a nutcase, until I outgrew my ego-driven ambition to earn a livelihood as a painter, for which my only regret is not having renounced art sooner. As primary collector of my own art and primary caretaker of my own health, I reside as an ape man in a nature preserve where the chickadees perch upon me, and where, because I do not smell like a predator, the deer do not flee me. And where I live without a tranquilizing tv, metastasizing microwave, alarming alarmclock, or handcuffing wristwatch. I've never shopped at Wal-Mart nor on eBay, but have browsed the stalls of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I've never set foot in nearby Foxwoods, but have hiked the faraway Grand Canyon from rim to river to rim. I've never drank Classic Coke or Coors or Starbucks, but have fasted just on water many times and many days. I'll never attain enlightenment nor see god, but perhaps I'll see into the future and see you reading this amazon webpage, or my own, that's: www.markbraunstein.org ("org" for organic, or whatever else may come to your mind)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The next level..., October 2, 1999

By 

"gymnalice" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic (Paperback)

After you've read John Robbins' "Diet for a New America", and digested it (pun intended) for a few months/years, it's time to read "Radical Vegetarianism". Mr. Braunstein will take your thinking and mentality about food, nutrition, and health to the next level. Sometimes caustic, often funny, and always intelligent and thought-provoking, this book is a great read and very inspiring.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars clever revelations, November 17, 2010

By 

Vegangenic Jen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic (Flashpoint) (Paperback)

I treasure this book. I don't agree with Braunstein on every point...like, I think my vegan diet--going on 9 years, now--probably isn't as healthy as Braunstein would like it to be. But still, I am so very glad I've read it & can refer back to it.

Who before Braunstein expressed the idea that in every glass of milk floats a metaphorical hunk of veal? Braunstein may have been the first. If I'd gotten my hands on this book sooner, maybe I would have realized sooner the inconsistency in my shunning meat while still consuming dairy.

Reading Rad Veg, I was continually amazed by the wordplay. Perfect confections, clever revelations. And here's a sample of his humor: "[Reader advisory: Reading about cancer could cause worry about cancer, and worrying about cancer could cause cancer; so if this advisory worries you, skip this next paragraph.]"

I learned some new words...like ataraxia: "'the undisturbed peace of mind before the turmoil of this world,' wrote Luigi Cornaro a half millenium ago, quoting a passage Zeno had written a millienium before..." explains Braunstein. That comes right after an excerpt from Kafka, in the same chapter as references to Shaw, Pasolini, and Tolstoy. To call Braunstein bookish and brainy, his writing erudite, would be understatements.

The Posthumous Postscript tells of his remarkable discovery of Edgar Kupfer's essay, "Animals, My Brethren," key parts of which are published in Rad Veg. A gem, indeed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crazy Wisdom, November 24, 2010

By 

Dustin G. Rhodes (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic (Flashpoint) (Paperback)

I don't really know how to put into words the writing style of the author. At once, it's playful, crazy, amusing, full of puns, silly, urgent...and I couldn't put the book down.

There are countless reasons to embrace a vegan lifestyle, and I'm endlessly interested in the journey that others travel to get there. This book is part manifesto and yet highly personal and thoughtful. Radical Vegetarianism deserved the re-print, and I hope people stumble upon it just like I did--not to mention, enjoy it as immensely.