Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As for this superficial set of essays by Susan Orlean assembled in “On Animals”: The type of "love" Orlean patronizingly has for animals is the type conventional reviewers love to praise and promote since it conveys, falsely but comfortably, that you can "love" nonhuman animals the way many white people in the South "loved" their African-American slaves while supporting their victims’ enslavement against their will (of course) and forcing them, through legalized torture and terror, to work or die or be sold. Orlean speaks of the animals she is "fascinated with" as if they were nothing more than objects for her amusement while ensuring that complacent readers will be unfazed by the human brutality and animal suffering she describes and supports. She shows no true respect for our fellow creatures, making her book just one more self-satisfied effusion that goes nowhere but back to the beginning. So much for the globetrotting aspect.