An exhaustive and informative guide to the intricacies of America’s food.
A diet and nutrition book exposes how the food industry victimizes the U.S. consumer.
The U.S. is one of the fattest and sickest nations on Earth. While Baldasare (The Nutrition Cure, 2015, etc.) once viewed Americans’ malnutrition as a problem of poor personal choices, he now realizes it is actually a more systemic issue. “The truth is that far too many of our food choices are made for us, not by us,” he writes. “The struggle to eat healthily…has become a battle in which many powerful forces are aligned against us.” The aims of this book are twofold. The first is to reveal the ways in which the food industry and its lobbyists have actively misled the public to serve their own needs, suppressing scientific research and waging a campaign of nutritional misinformation. The second is to inform consumers as to what foods and ingredients they are actually eating and how to cut through the cultural noise to locate sources of real nutrition. Divided into brief sections, many less than a page, the book tackles the myriad topics that constitute the current diet debate: from the diseases that most affect the American public to strategies employed by the food industry to sell products (including packaging, qualified and unqualified health claims, ecology and ethics labels, and plastic coding) to breakdowns of the additives, fats, pesticides, and other specifics for each food group. The author concludes with the current state of food activism and provides an appendix of useful charts documenting everything from types of food coloring to sources of gluten. For Baldasare, an informed public remains the best chance at fixing the food system, and he offers an impressive amount of information. Writing in a clear, practical prose aimed at the general reader, the author approaches each topic with candor and occasional humor (“Got milk? If you’re a US citizen, your government certainly hopes so”). The book’s encyclopedic nature lends itself more to discretionary browsing than to proceeding straight through, but readers of all lifestyles should learn troubling and helpful facts about the food they eat.
An exhaustive and informative guide to the intricacies of America’s food.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9832431-6-8
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 Yorker staff 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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