A highly informative, well-reasoned call to rethink the throne.
A chronicle of the quest for the loo of the future.
Toilet humor is one thing, but toilet fact, as digested by skilled science writer Wald, is quite another. Given that the average annual output of each human is “about 100 pounds of poop and about 140 gallons of pee,” human societies have always felt a pressing need to figure out what to do with it. One ancient Mesopotamian settlement, writes the author, devised the pit latrine, with a network of subterranean ceramic rings that helped distribute human output into the nearby fields, yielding agricultural benefits. Many places have devolved since that time. In rural India, for instance, people repair to favored outdoor venues that, with modest usage, can accommodate the visits while Indian cities produce enough output to destroy the country’s rivers. That’s the standard for roughly half the world’s population, Wald reckons, and this yields a lethal roster of diseases. If the human gut is “one of the most densely populated and biologically diverse microbial habitats on earth,” some of its contents include norovirus, E. coli, and other illness-causing elements. Just as the toilets we rely on turned up during plagues of old, so the current coronavirus crisis should prompt a new kind of toilet, one that will “not only thwart pathogens like those that cause cholera and typhoid but also protect against a modern scourge: a wide range of man-made pollutants…that enter our sanitation systems. Beyond that, it might even monitor the daily deposits of users, communicating with doctors and public health officials in order to catch individual diseases and community outbreaks early.” Arriving at new toilet designs figures into much of this lucid narrative, with solutions that produce biodegradable concrete coatings and fertilizer. A new toilet is essential, writes Wald, for “if sanitation doesn’t work for all of us, it works for none of us.”
A highly informative, well-reasoned call to rethink the throne.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982116-21-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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