An unfocused backwoods ramble among people who forage for a living.
The author of Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager (2009) finds a rich subculture in mushroom hunters.
Mushrooms: one of those love-it-or-hate-it foods, up there with beets and anchovies. For Cook, mushrooms fall firmly in his love-it category. He opens with a declaration: “My obsession with fungi arrived like a sickness,” he writes. “It consumed me.” With that obsession driving, the author went out to find not just wild mushrooms, but the people who venture into forests and other secluded areas to find them. He met up with Doug, a hunter and self-proclaimed redneck with bad teeth, who acted as Cook’s guide to the mushroom-hunters subculture. With guidance from Doug, Cook rambled on from one hunting excursion to the next, all around the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Along the way, he met a full array of quirky, colorful characters—bearded mountain men, Laotian immigrants, and Jeremy Faber, whose company supplies foraged foods to high-end restaurateurs—but none of them are as well fleshed out as Doug. Overall, there’s not much narrative pull behind the book; Cook mostly seems to drift from one hunt to the next with little focus, and closing the story with the unexpected death of Faber’s former girlfriend feels tacked-on. Further, the author whipsaws between language so terse it reads like bad Hemingway (“The temperature was dropping. Soon it would snow in the high country. Som had a lot to think about”) and cringe-worthy purple prose—e.g., “Enveloping you like a cloud is the aroma and taste of a night of lovemaking — an earthy musk, a taste of sweetness and of sweat, a complexity that would make a wine snob blush.”
An unfocused backwoods ramble among people who forage for a living.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-53625-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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