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has exploded in the last century: Politicians have been bought, regulatory laws have been gutted or completely repealed, and “seven food industry barons” have each “built an empire by taking advantage of deregulation to amass extreme wealth at the expense of everyone else.”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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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