A genuinely revelatory look at mass food production in the United States.
A report on the dangerous and disgraceful state of the American food industry.
In his nonfiction debut, Frerick provides in-depth profiles of seven American food companies and the families who own and run them. The author charts how the growth of these companies has exploded in the last century: Politicians have been bought, regulatory laws have been gutted or completely repealed, and “seven food industry barons” have each “built an empire by taking advantage of deregulation to amass extreme wealth at the expense of everyone else.” Frerick writes about the meatpacking giant JBS, noting that in 2017 investigators from the Brazil government accused some of the company’s employees of bribing meat inspectors to allow tainted meats to be served in public schools. He also discusses the Cargill-MacMillan family, owners of Cargill, Inc. (the largest private company in America), identifying their business as one of the “huge, regional-scale corporations owned by just one or a few families who use their political connections to overpower both local democracy and local businesses.” His overview of the tiny handful of companies that provide the vast majority of all kinds of food for Americans naturally includes an analysis of Walmart, the mega-company that, per Frerick, “has triggered a race to the bottom in every imaginable way” by playing a central role in shifting food-shopping to a “private, for-profit space.” Frerick’s prose throughout is both direct and masterfully controlled, with every point supported by extensive references and notes. This is no alarmist screed but rather a careful, systematic, and utterly damning demolition job—an exquisitely informed exposé. In these pages, the author unflinchingly explores the graft involved in suborning politicians, the guile used in circumventing the few regulations that do exist, the staggering cruelty of livestock farming, and sobering societal ramifications (“one’s income will increasingly be reflected in one’s waistline”); the result is quietly devastating.
A genuinely revelatory look at mass food production in the United States.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781642832693
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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