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FAST-FOOD KIDS

FRENCH FRIES, LUNCH LINES, AND SOCIAL TIES

The book may be useful for sociology teachers and students, but general readers and policymakers will find this tough to...

A cultural analysis of what kids eat and why.

To understand what food reveals about the cultural and economic factors of young peoples’ lives, Best (Sociology/George Mason Univ.; Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars, 2005, etc.) observed young people in urban and suburban school cafeterias and nearby fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s and Chipotle. She also gathered information from ethnically and economically diverse young people about family meals and interviewed adults working in the food system. In her examination of youth food consumption, the author deals with a host of unexpected tensions and complexities. In the first chapter, she focuses on food and family life, followed by a few chapters on the school cafeteria setting, with all its social inequalities, and a chapter on behaviors in commercial settings. Best reports that school food “holds little if any sacred value" and that understanding commercial fast-food consumption “requires attention to the role and relevance of social-spatial relations.” There is a nod to the problems of childhood obesity, but solutions are not the author’s forte. As with her earlier youth studies—Prom Night and Fast Cars, Cool Rides—the title suggests a work for general readers, but this is a densely written study aimed at sociologists. In the language of a practicing ethnographer, Best writes in her introduction that this work is an “attempt to demonstrate the value of cultural analysis...and to make a case for what greater attention to culture, with its focus on collective meaning, schemes of value, symbolic action, and social interaction, yields for health policy and public decision making.” For her fellow researchers, Best includes an appendix explaining the methods she used in her study.

The book may be useful for sociology teachers and students, but general readers and policymakers will find this tough to digest.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4798-0232-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: New York Univ.

Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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