Perhaps Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a nonfiction exploration of how meat makes its way to our tables, will seem like a departure from his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But like those books, which consider the Holocaust and 9/11 respectively, Eating Animals is focused on atrocity and how people perpetrate it. You might not consider chickens and cows to be as important as human beings, but Foer makes a convincing case for why our carnivorous habits deserve to be reconsidered.

What differentiates Eating Animals, unfortunately, is that it’s a bit of a mess. Though it displays the spark and empathy of Foer’s fiction, this extended think piece, with its oscillations between the personal and the political, would have worked better as a concise, less rambling broadside. Still, Foer’s argument is airtight. The book doesn’t include photographs, but the explicit descriptions of carnage – particularly in factory farms – hold nothing back: Turkeys are bred into genetic freaks, cows are eviscerated while still half alive, chickens are locked in shoebox-size cages. And lest you think that we have better things to worry about than vegetarianism, Foer does a handy job of showing how the factory farm is intertwined with other items on the front page. Eating animals is a primary cause of global warming; ingesting meat full of antibiotics is destroying our health; and if you want a look at the vile face of free-market capitalism and a world in which the profit margin trumps all else, you can’t do much better than the modern slaughterhouse.

Because of the author’s visibility, Eating Animals could end up bringing about great change, despite its rambling structure. Foer is well placed to bring these serious concerns to a mainstream audience in a way that well-written but underexposed books such as Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation never will. A savvy publicist would do well to slip a copy to Oprah before the holidays.

Scott Indrisek