A brief, useful primer with enough provocative food for thought for newcomers and veterans alike.
An ideology-free outline of the paleo approach to dining, focusing on why certain foods are invited, or snubbed, at the paleo table.
Spivey is after one all-embracing quality: to be healthy in body and mind. She makes no outlandish claims for the paleo way of eating—to call it a “diet” conveys that it is a weight-loss program, which may or not happen depending on personal circumstances. Rather, she provides a simple introduction to the paleo larder in the fashion of a Q-and-A, with intervening paragraphs that probe modestly into both the paleo way and what feeling healthy leads to. The argument is “to eat unprocessed, whole foods that are rich in nutrients (‘nutrient dense’) and avoid eating foods that can contribute to poor health.” This could easily lead into the great food debates and the various understanding/misunderstanding of proteins, carbs, fats, sugars, and salt, but Spivey sidesteps those issues. She sets a table for readers, giving short explanations why there are plenty of vegetables, animal protein, some fruits and berries, a small square of dark chocolate—and nothing refined, processed, or possessing grain or sugar. The author skims over genetically modified organisms, the balancing of acid with alkaline, and intestinal leakage, but she capably fields questions of constipation, inflammation, vegetarianism, and veganism. Critically, she wrings the zealotry out of the paleo approach, the holier-than-thou attitude that sometimes plagues its devotees. The paleo table is a cloth of many colors, out of which you can fashion bespoke mealtimes; it is a lifestyle, not some guru shilling a diet. “Be consistent, not obsessed,” writes Spivey. “If you feel great ending your meal with some cheese and apple slices, then have it!” Go for nutrients per calorie, and be moderate in your moderation. The author also doesn’t forget about the importance of sunshine, exercise, sex, and sleep.
A brief, useful primer with enough provocative food for thought for newcomers and veterans alike.Pub Date: July 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9968434-1-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Smiling Water Group
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2016
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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