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VITAMANIA

OUR OBSESSIVE QUEST FOR NUTRITIONAL PERFECTION

Though Price doesn’t provide much new information, the reading is easy and the message is clear and significant.

A catchy title that captures our obsession with vitamins and our belief that getting plenty of them will ensure our good health.

However, freelance journalist Price has produced a book much broader in scope than the title indicates. The author provides a history of the discovery of vitamins (the word was not even coined until 1912) and of the finding that certain diseases—e.g., scurvy, pellagra and rickets—are caused by vitamin deficiencies. She also makes clear that there is still much uncertainty about what these chemical entities actually do and how much of them our bodies require. The larger story, however, is about the thousands of dietary supplements that are widely marketed even though very little is known about them. Public interest and confidence in vitamins has led to a similar relationship with supplements of all kinds; according to the author, there are some 85,000 different dietary supplements on the market. Price’s research into the regulation of dietary supplements reveals the forces that created the present situation: Why there is no FDA approval process for supplements, and why they do not need to be tested for safety or efficacy. Consequently, it is nearly impossible for consumers to identify high-quality supplements. So, how does one stay healthy in the midst of all this uncertainty? Price’s answer is simple: Eat fruits and vegetables and other nutrient-dense foods that are naturally high in vitamins. Avoid overprocessed foods from which natural vitamins have been removed and which are then artificially enriched with synthetic vitamins. If you do choose to take a nutritional supplement, try to learn what is in it, and let your doctor know, too. Appendices provide specific data about the nature and function of each of the vitamins, and tables list the recommended daily intake based on age and sex.

Though Price doesn’t provide much new information, the reading is easy and the message is clear and significant.

Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015

ISBN: 978-1594205040

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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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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