MADNESS: The Deep Driver of Our Climate Crisis
Lessons from my family farm
by Jim Mason
107 pages. 2025.
Reviewed by Mark Mathew Braunstein
Connecticut resident Mark Mathew Braunstein, 74, vegetarian since 1966, paraplegic since 1990, is author of six books, including Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic (1981).
Allured by its provocative title, Madness, and by its cover depicting Edvard Munch’s iconic painting “The Scream,” I could not resist poking my nose into this book. Yet such a title and cover will likely repulse as many readers as it might attract. That might be the author’s intention. Because this book is not for the faint of heart.
Mostly a memoir, Madness recounts Jim Mason’s harrowing childhood experiences while growing up on a family dairy farm.
Not only did Mason witness firsthand the routine cruelties involved in raising and killing farm animals, he also involuntarily participated in those rites of passage expected of all boys raised on family farms.
If you question how life on a dairy farm can be harrowing, then you’ve not read any of Mason’s journalism, nor his two previous books.
“Jim Mason has devoted his life to dispelling those myths”
In contrast to large-scale factory farming that is today’s norm, you might think of the small family farms of the past as bucolic and idyllic.
If so, you are a misinformed consumer who has been duped by the meat and dairy industries into believing that farm animals, then as now, have historically been raised in bucolic paradises, where the sheep are tenderly herded by Timmy and Lassie, where the chickens scamper playfully outside the front porch as they peck near Grandpas’ feet, where the cows are lovingly milked by Timmy’s mom, and where the calves, male and female alike, are suckled and nurtured by Elsie the Cow.
Jim Mason has devoted his life to dispelling those myths through his public speaking and writing. This book, however, is less an exposé of animal agriculture’s gruesome realities and more a chronicle of his lifelong campaign to expose them.
(JimMason.com photo)
“The Deep Driver of Our Climate Crisis”
While he is angry and mad that the myths persist, his is not the Madness of this book’s title. Mason is a peaceful and rational man. The book’s vague title surely could have been more specific. By Madness is meant depravity.
Madness of what exactly? The answer awaits in a phrase on page 55, “The Madness of the Agrarian Worldview.”
Likewise, the subtitle “The Deep Driver of Our Climate Crisis” should have been “Lessons from My Family Farm.” As an accurate description of the book, that phrase does appear on the cover.
Thus, two threads are woven throughout the book. Arranged in alternating chapters, they are “Lessons from My Family Farm” and “The Depravity of the Agrarian Worldview.”
Two threads
The first thread comprises his memoir. The second thread provides a refresher course in the history narrated and the theory advanced in his 1993 book An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature.
(Reissued in 2021: see An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature by Jim Mason, reviewed by Merritt Clifton.)
Still alive and kicking (ass) at age 84, Mason has led a fascinating and fruitful life. His backstory is more diverse than you might imagine. Attorney, soldier, author, scholar, researcher, investigator, dishwasher, husband, and yes, husbandry farmer.
But Mason neglected to mention in his memoir one very important piece of his personal puzzle: Editor. Jim Mason was the founding editor of the influential news monthly Animals’ Agenda.
Launched in 1979, defunct in 2002, Animals’ Agenda was the first magazine devoted to animal rights.
Read Animals’ Agenda ahead of Mad
I read all three of Jim Mason’s previous stellar books: Animal Factories (1990, co-authored with the illustrious Peter Singer); The Way We Eat (2006, also co-authored with Peter Singer); and An Unnatural Order (1993).
Jim Mason’s first book moved me to action. His third book stirred my mind.
Animals’ Agenda won my heart. Every month when the latest issue arrived in my mail, I cast aside all my other reading material, namely books, newspapers, and magazines, even my other cherished magazine, Mad.
(Is there a common theme here?)
When Mason eventually moved on from Animals’ Agenda, I well recall his editorial announcing his departure. He stated that he had grown weary of shuffling papers all day long. He is one busy and restless dude.
(Editor’s note: Animals’ Agenda peaked in readership during the four years, 1988-1992, when ANIMALS 24-7 founder Merritt Clifton was news editor, arriving a year after Mason left.)
Four shortcomings
MADNESS: The Deep Driver of Our Climate Crisis, an equally stellar book, is nevertheless marred by four shortcomings: the vague title, the misleading subtitle “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Farmer,” and the chaotic formatting of the print edition.
Despite its minor flaws, this book is still well worth reading. Yet a fourth flaw exists in a chapter that should be skipped.
That superfluous chapter, appearing on pages 11–18, is “Mason Farm, 1940s.” It appears early in the book, where it is likely to discourage readers from proceeding further. A detailed history of Mason’s family tree could be of interest only to his surviving family members.
The author may have felt the need to portray his ancestors as hardworking and honest pillars of the community in order not to cast them as ghoulish monsters for the routine atrocities they inflicted upon their farm animals.
After all, such cruelty was routine for all farmers of past generations. As though a prescient warning, that chapter is not listed in the table of contents.
Printed vs. audio editions
Another reader advisory: the page layout of the printed book suffers from conversion directly from writing software, rather than having been put through intermediary book design software. The micro-font is too tiny compared to the overly spacious leading between lines of print.
Also, most of the sidebar quotes are misplaced. As a print-on-demand book, the inking is thin, and most of the left-hand pages so faint as to strain my eyes. While that could be unique only to my copy, such a fault is common among other print-on-demand books.
Here, too, a solution is simple. Rather than the printed book, purchase the Audiobook or the eBook!
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Editors’ note: For further insight into Jim Mason’s theme in Madness, see Mason’s review done for ANIMALS 24-7 of The Origins & Spread of Domestic Animals in Southwest Asia & Europe.
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Those were my favorite magazines too. My dad loved MAD and though I was too young for a lot of the humor, I got ahold of these magazines anyway — ever my dad’s daughter!
We as the “most intelligent” (?!!) species seem to have forgotten, or be ignoring, the most basic of survival requirements. And the peril extends beyond “just” the other animals with whom we are supposed to share this planet.
Sharing with (weary) gratitude.
Animals’ Agenda was one of the important steps to expand the animal rights movement. Many activists, including myself, submitted articles exposing what I called the 3Es: Eating, Experimenting and Entertaining. This helped support and raise public awareness of animal rights!
Current Info: Lifeforce Foundation Facebook and Lifeforce Ecology You Tube.