J. Moussaieff Masson

In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and the environment. It raises questions to make us conscious of the decisions behind every bite we take: What effect does eating animals have on our land, waters, even global warming? What are the results of farming practices—debeaking chickens and separating calves from their mothers—on animals and humans? How does the health of animals affect the health of our planet and our bodies? And uniquely, as a psychoanalyst, Masson investigates how denial keeps us from recognizing the animal at the end of our fork—think pig, not bacon—and each food and those that are forbidden. The Face on intellectual, psychological, and emotional expertise over the last twenty years into the pivotal book of the food revolution.

The best-selling author of Dogs Never Lie About Love and When Elephants Weep pays tribute to one hundred of his favorite animals, offering fascinating profiles and information about the daily lives of dolphins, hummingbirds, dugongs, hippos, kakapos, and other familiar and little-known creatures.

In ancient India, a cat named Billie makes his way through the countryside, enjoying his freedom, but when the holiday season approaches, Billie finds himself alone until he is drawn into the lives of a happy and contented family.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s groundbreaking bestseller, When Elephants Weep, was the first book since Darwin’s time to explore emotions in the animal kingdom, particularly from animals in the wild. Now, he focuses exclusively on the contained world of the farm animal, revealing startling, irrefutable evidence that barnyard creatures have feelings too, even consciousness. Weaving history, literature, anecdotes, scientific studies, and Masson’s own vivid experiences observing pigs, cows, sheep, goats, and chickens over the course of five years, this important book at last gives voice, meaning, and dignity to these gentle beasts that are bred to be milked, shorn, butchered, and eaten. Can we ever know what makes an animal happy? Many animal behaviorists say no. But Jeffrey Masson has a different view: An animal is happy if it can live according to its own nature. Farm animals suffer greatly in this regard. Chickens, for instance, like to perch in trees at night, to avoid predators and to nestle with friends. The obvious conclusion: They cannot be happy when confined twenty to a cage. From field and barn, to pen and coop, Masson bears witness to the emotions and intelligence of these remarkable farm animals, each unique with distinct qualities. Curious, intelligent, self-reliant–many will find it hard to believe that these attributes describe a pig. In fact, there is much that humans share with pigs. They dream, know their names, and can see colors. Mother cows mourn the loss of their calves when their babies are taken away to slaughter. Given a choice between food that is nutritious or lacking in minerals, sheep will select the former, balancing their diet and correcting the deficiency. Goats display quite a sense of humor, dignity, and fearlessness (Indian goats have been known to kill leopards). Chickens are naturally sociable–they will gather around a human companion and stand there serenely preening themselves or sit quietly on the ground beside someone they trust. For far too long farm animals have been denigrated and treated merely as creatures of instinct rather than as sentient beings. Shattering the abhorrent myth of the “dumb animal without feelings,” Jeffrey Masson has written a revolutionary book that is sure to stir human emotions far and wide.

Drawing from literature, history, animal behavioral research, and the wonderful true stories of cat experts and cat lovers around the world, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson vividly explores the delights and mysteries of the feline heart. But at the core of this remarkable book are Masson’s candid, often amusing observations of his own five cats. Their mischievousness, aloofness, and affection provide a way to examine emotions from contentment to jealousy, from anger to love. The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats will captive readers with its surprises, offering a new perspective on the deep connection shared by humans and their feline friends.

A collection of true stories demonstrating that animals have feelings, including "An Elephant Saves a Baby Rhino," "The Mother Cat Who Went Into the Fire to Save Her Kittens," and "The Sadness of a Peregrine Falcon."

Introduces extraordinary fathers such as the emperor penguin, the wolf, the beaver, the sea horse, and the marmoset. Also examines nature's worst fathers: lions, langurs, bears and humans.

From dancing squirrels to bashful gorillas to spiteful killer whales, Masson and coauthor Susan McCarthy bring forth fascinating anecdotes and illuminating insights that offer powerful proof of the existence of animal emotion. Chapters on love, joy, anger, fear, shame, compassion, and loneliness are framed by a provocative re-evaluation of how we treat animals, from hunting and eating them to scientific experimentation. Forming a complete and compelling picture of the inner lives of animals, When Elephants Weep assures that we will never look at animals in the same way again.

In My Father's Guru, Jeffrey Masson has written a stunning coming-of-age story - an astonishing "prequel" to his critically acclaimed Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst. Masson grew up in the 1940s and 1950s with a guru in his house - the celebrated mystic Paul Brunton (P.B. to those who knew him), who numbered Masson's parents among his handful of close disciples and singled out the young Jeff as a potential heir to his spiritual kingdom. In 1956, P.B. convinced the Massons that a third world war was imminent and recommended they move to Montevideo, a "safe" location. From Uruguay, Masson went off at P.B.'s bidding to study Sanskrit at Harvard, where he came to understand the man was not what he presented himself to be. Written with wit and an affection tinged with disillusion that is never bitter, My Father's Guru is a fascinating memoir in the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception; a book not only about P.B., but about what it means to grow up in the shadow of a man who laid claim to such enormous power. In emerging from the hothouse world of spiritually, Masson began a journey through disillusion into a critical understanding of the roots of power and powerlessness.

"A bright, talented junior at Catamount College in the druggy 1970s, Gillian Brauer strives to realize more than a poet's craft in her workshop with the charismatic, anti-establishment professor Andre Harrow. For Gillian has fallen in love - with Harrow, with his aesthetic sensibility and bohemian lifestyle, with his secluded cottage on Brierly Lane, with the mystique of his imposing, russet-haired French wife, Dorcas. A sculptress, Dorcas has outraged the campus and alumnae with the crude, primitive, larger than life-sized wooden totems that she has exhibited under the motto "We are Beasts and This is Our Consolation."". "As if mesmerized, Gillian enters the rarefied world of the Harrows. She surrenders to their cassoulets, Quaaludes, and intimacies. She is special, even though she knows her classmates Marisa and Sybil and the exotic, mysterious Dominique have preceded her here. She is helpless, she is powerful. And she will learn in full the meaning of Dorcas's provocative motto."--BOOK JACKET.

"A groundbreaking, inspiring, and deeply personal exploration of the unique relationship between dogs and humans, from the bestselling author of DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE"--