A thoughtful meditation on the systems that bring food to the table—and that drive some people to push it away.
An agile treatise on food, hunger, self-starvation, and the politics underlying it all.
“The DSM-5 would like to know if you are a person who wants to eat, or if you are a person who doesn’t.” British scholar and author Husain ponders her own longtime indifference toward food, having “basically forgotten how to eat.” Such indifference sets off therapeutic alarm bells, of course, and Husain observes sagely that it’s the “female condition” that drives the food narrative, the symptoms and behaviors following a trajectory that the psychiatric reference work concludes is an unwillingness to change one’s habits of consumption: the anorexic as dissenter and rebel, and one who can be shepherded if not bullied into learning about proper self-care and then wanting to practice it. But, writes Husain, the DSM-5 “doesn’t acknowledge that you can want, and be suspicious of, the same thing at once,” put off one’s food as a political act. Husain enlists a wide cast of characters in her discussion, among them Simone Weil, who famously starved herself to death “without a plan,” resigned to a world of genocide and totalitarianism at the height of World War II, and Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, who denounced the British government’s use of hunger as a political weapon in places like Ireland. From there she examines connections between food and political activism, citing the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program as a revolutionary act, “a fuel for the act of growing a political consciousness.” Given the hunger of people living in places such as Gaza today, food continues to have a strong political dimension, reason enough, Husain concludes, that while in such circumstances the idea of food as comfort seems wrong, “contributing to a better world requires that you live, and that you thrive.”
A thoughtful meditation on the systems that bring food to the table—and that drive some people to push it away.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781668060315
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Washington Square Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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