Another compilation of nutritional facts rather than a fresh diet plan to add to the already stuffed category.
A board-certified surgeon offers a manual for how to live a healthier, longer life and look good after age 40.
In this volume, Taha argues that disease should be treated through the combined efforts of diet, exercise, nutrition and medication. The author grew up among farmers like his father, for whom daily life was built around physical labor and eating seasonally. As Taha, a Palestinian immigrant who came to the United States as a doctor, has aged, he has developed diabetes and eye problems, which have caused him to reflect on the differences between American and Palestinian lifestyles and health management. In this book, he targets middle-aged Americans, ill or not, aiming to show readers how to apply a Mediterranean farmer’s way of living in order to be healthier. Taha’s farmer’s diet is fairly simple and unfortunately proposes very little that is new; he advises to exercise, avoid sugar, utilize antioxidants and keep your brain active. This plan generally reinforces accepted ideas and just places them under Taha’s four W’s–walk, work, watch weight/waist, water–and four recommended F’s–fiber, fish, fruit and fat. The earlier chapters meander unnecessarily while delving into Taha’s personal health problems, the basic tenets of the farmer’s diet and from where it derives. It’s the later chapters that reveal the most valuable information, as the book moves away from personal narrative and acts as a compendium of foods. Each chapter focuses on a particular food group, including dairy, meat, beans, oil and whole grains, breaking each down in terms of their vitamin/mineral content, number of calories and nutritional benefits in relation to avoiding particular ailments. For example, red beans are high in insoluble fiber, which helps prevent colon cancer, constipation and more. Less interesting are chapters on stress and osteoporosis, which simply reiterate common knowledge, providing little in the way of innovative approaches.
Another compilation of nutritional facts rather than a fresh diet plan to add to the already stuffed category.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4363-4935-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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