“So while I may disagree with Ball on many subjects of politics and even ethics...”
From Amazon (Australia):
The wisdom and unabashed honesty of a serial disillusioning“Disillusionment is the hardest trick a seasoned magician can pull. Other magicians like these tricks the least, and the human is a fickle creature who craves trickery just enough to release the tension and pain of life. This book is a manual for disillusionment, and it’s better than most at it, so it demands to be read despite every note of tension and release.
Starting slow and in adagio, like the opening of a funeral march, it's a book that foreshadows, plays, jokes, inspires, saddens and delights. It takes time but the whole composition is an expansive and explosive one by the time it is running to the end. A memoir first of all, an ode to a special woman and relationship, a reflection on friendship and betrayal, a drama of health and ideas, a disquisition on suffering, and a philosophy of life... all held together by the original and incisive voice of a narrator who has lived, then suffered, suffered again, survived, suffered more, and loved all throughout. The disillusionment this involves is what holds together a moveable feast of pithy reflections. We are held in their wake, and we have gained rather than lost.
“It takes a special kind of character to be a disillusionist, and the author of Losing My Religions - which instantly makes me think of REM on loop - is a special kind of case of someone who has serially lost the meaning of life only to pull it out, slyly, like a magician at a show making any audience appreciate the delicacy with which illusions are broken to be replaced by a life lived in the shadows of consequences.
We're talking about Matt Ball, here, founder of ..., One Step for Animals, and animal activist since before it was widely thinkable for a Midwest American boy to be one. He has always stood tall in my imagination, like the neatly dressed magician at a show who pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Only when Ball turned up at animal rights conferences and talks, he didn't pull the rabbit out, argued vivisection was not a priority, and drew on clear sight and facts to shine the light on chickens, who are the most brutalised animals on Earth in a brutally statistical way that anything less than chicken activism afterwards seems like a distraction.
“The author has won and lost friends - many friends - for his feats of free thinking, but he may never be welcomed back into the Vegan Club about which animals care next to nothing. Not that this would faze him. This is the kind of book that wins friends who also value free thinking and who don't put their labels above suffering and exploitation of others. So while I may disagree with Ball on many subjects of politics and even ethics, but what we do agree on is the need to fully live all the tensions of compassion and evidence. This is the art of the disillusionist whose radical pragmatism can teach us all more than a thing or two about the meaning of life.”
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