A well-researched effort that will undoubtedly add to general readers’ knowledge about the food they consume on a daily...
Veteran food journalist Marx de Salcedo delves into a previously obscure organization in the Boston suburbs that influences perhaps half the items for sale in supermarkets.
The organization, within the Department of Defense, is found on military charts as the Combat Feeding Directorate, which is part of the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center. The book, which includes astonishing facts in every chapter, stems partly from investigative journalism about food quality, partly from the author’s fascination with how she feeds her family (“I’ve always been a passionate home cook”), and partly from concern about the future of nutrition. The premise sounds simple: nourishment developed to feed combat troops in remote battle zones has come to dominate food consumed by American civilians. That truism, in the author's value system, becomes a mixed blessing. She wants troops to eat well, but she feels shaky about how the research has compromised the food supply outside war zones. Marx de Salcedo gained limited access to the Army facilities in Natick, and her account of the tour and her resulting analysis of highly technical scientific literature make for interesting, if sometimes laborious, reading. However, when she begins to apply what she learned to specific foods and preservation processes, readers will eagerly go along. The author devotes individual chapters to the development and consumption of energy bars, processed meats, bread, cheese, pizza, and plastic packaging. Marx de Salcedo comments that by discovering the military genesis of so many everyday supermarket items, "I've breached the secret, beating heart of the industrial food system." According to the author, current research by the scientists at Natick contains the potential to change eating habits entirely, including the traditional regimen of three distinct meals per day.
A well-researched effort that will undoubtedly add to general readers’ knowledge about the food they consume on a daily basis.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59184-597-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Current
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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