I love a book club! Actually, because I have such a limited attention span I can hardly make it through a magazine article - I love being made to complete a book. When I can, I like to participate in the Bay Area Vegetarian book club. 
Preparing to attend my May book club I read Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson. This book was published and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002.
Well, Patterson takes us through an absorbing historical overview of man's obsession with creating the "other". The necessary disconnect produced by assigning sub-human status to the Native American, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Arab, Jew, take your pick. Transformed into monkey, pig, predator, vermin, insect, savage, germ. Each without human reason, incapable of sensing pain. All requiring taming, domestication, punishment, control and extermination.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. Here's a tip, though. Don't even try highlighting and tagging. Every page is a candidate for something you knew but couldn't express properly, something you need to share with someone else or something you must remember. By page 100 you'll have given up with all that obsessive behavior. As for me. I just couldn't pub the book down!
