From today's "Shelf Awareness"

Shelf Starter: An American Trilogy

An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery and Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River by Steven M. Wise (Da Capo Press, $26, 9780306814754/0306814757, March 23, 2009)

Opening lines of books we want to read, excerpted from the prologue:

In the fall of 2008, I learned that an undercover agent working for People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had been investigating reports of cruelty at a large hog-breeding farm. I asked PETA lawyer Dan Paden to send me some video showing what their agent had seen.

I thought that nothing we humans do to pigs could upend me. Then Paden sent me a four-minute highlights clip of what the latest farm investigator had seen. Soon after I flicked it on, I began crying so uncontrollably that it took me an hour and a half to finish it.

In this book, I do not recite the atrocities we perpetuate upon pigs. Instead, I discuss why we think it's okay to inflict them. And that discussion brings us to the study of history. [The slaughterhouse] rested on what were once the fields of a plantation . . . both slaughterhouse and plantation occupied ground upon which had strode, and likely lived, Native Americans.

North Carolina's settlers were mostly Protestant, mostly Englishmen. They brought their Bibles with them and located varied alleged Divine justifications for exterminating the Indians, enslaving Africans, and inflicting hideous cruelties upon mother pigs and their babies . . . The stories of how the Indian genocide, the black chattel slavery, and the war upon pigs were perpetrated, how the first two were overturned by the religious themselves, and how the justification for the last is being vigorously challenged today, again by the religious, is An American Trilogy.

--Selected by Marilyn Dahl