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Eat Real Food or Else...

A COOKBOOK FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

An easy-to-follow guide to a healthier lifestyle featuring delicious recipes.

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Science and food writing combine in this cookbook, which offers a new way to look at the American diet. 

Eating healthfully can be hard in this day and age, particularly with so many opinions and so much advice about the subject out there. This work is armed with the mindset that “real food”—that is, food that’s natural and not overly processed—is key to a healthy diet, and it explores what and how much to eat and when to eat it. The book’s rules are simple: readers should seek out food that’s colorful, micronutrient-rich, whole, and comes from healthful sources. After examining the “ideal” plate of food, the work explains common diet buzzwords, such as “glycemic index,” and the roles that fats, carbohydrates, and sugar play in American diets. Then there’s a recipe section, divided into categories such as “Soup, Salads & Appetizers,” “Vegetables,” “Main Courses,” and “Breakfast, Snacks & Condiments.” Also included are breakout sections on everything from cruciferous vegetables and their benefits to what cooking oils to avoid. Nguyên (Cuisine de Montagne Pas à Pas, 2012, etc.), a culinary writer; Nichols (Quantitative Medicine, 2016), a doctor; and debut author Vollmar, a chef, are all trained professionals in their respective fields, and as a result, they leave no stone unturned in this book. One should always consult with one’s physician before starting a new diet, but the authors lay out the diet in this work in an easy-to-understand manner. It’s not necessary to read the science to understand the recipes, but they do combine to provide a holistic approach to healthy eating. Recipes such as “Spring Ratatouille,” “Duck Cassoulet,” “Parmesan Crackers,” and “Asparagus and Collard Greens Slaw” boast full-color pictures of the step-by-step process as well as of the finished result. The simple instructions make the work manageable for novice chefs. For readers looking to eat better or just whip up something delicious, this cookbook may be just the (meal) ticket.

An easy-to-follow guide to a healthier lifestyle featuring delicious recipes.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-9862520-1-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Golden Lotus

Review Posted Online: April 20, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

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WHY WE SWIM

An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.

A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.

For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).

An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.

Pub Date: April 14, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...

A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.

In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010

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