A book that neatly punctures food myths while encouraging a splendid, healthful diversity at table.
A game and occasionally gamy exploration of diet fads and the quest for the perfect plate.
Harvard evolutionary biology professor Lieberman likes his yogurt, coffee, and even the occasional Big Mac, which “fires up your brain like few other meals.” Most modern diet plans would find fault with one or another of those offerings: A keto practitioner would run in terror from the carbs, a vegetarian from the burger, a vegan from the cheese, a paleo aficionado from the lettuce. By Lieberman’s account, while modern industrial, sugary, heavily processed foods “are sickening and killing millions of people every year,” no one solution offers a miracle. Walking the walk, he attempts to follow a range of common fads for a couple of weeks apiece. Some he finds immediately unappealing, particularly the raw diet advanced by so many health-guru types, not least of them the Swiss doctor who invented muesli. “Animals who eat solely raw food evidently do just fine,” Lieberman allows, but they really have to work at it, whether traveling long distances to find wild fruit or chasing down a gazelle. There’s something to be said for cooking, then. As to the vaunted paleo fad, he pronounces, “there was no single Paleolithic diet,” adding that our Stone Age forebears enjoyed forbidden things like porridge and lentils. Not surprisingly, one diet that best passes muster is the Mediterranean, although, as with all things, Lieberman offers scientifically based qualifications. Sometimes the science gets a little thick, for that matter, as when he discusses the behavior of various of our gut microbes and the splendid ways in which they ferment the fiber we can’t easily digest, a win-win for all. In the end, Lieberman maintains, with due gravitas, “Humans evolved to be superlative omnivores who eat just about anything—plants and animals—to maximize not health but reproductive success.”
A book that neatly punctures food myths while encouraging a splendid, healthful diversity at table.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9780593537992
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.
A new exposé of the American meat industry.
Since Upton Sinclair’s 1906 bestseller, The Jungle, denunciations of the meat industry appear regularly, and they remain fully justified. A simple description of what happens when an animal enters a slaughterhouse will horrify most readers, and equally time-honored are journalists’ depictions of low-wage slaughterhouse work, which is gruesome, dangerous, and unhealthy. Sorvino, who runs the coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes, does not ignore these easy marks, but she aims higher, targeting multinational corporations, billionaires, global trade, climate change, soil destruction, and pollution. “Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations,” she writes, “but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future.” American farmers and meat processors benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, but their profits are a result of their cruel, assembly-line efficiency in factory farms or titanic feedlots, where the animals consume hyperdense feed, chemicals, and antibiotics to boost their weight before slaughter. Research reveals strong evidence that processed food, including bacon, ham, hot dogs, and salami, can cause cancer. Readers will gnash their teeth at Sorvino’s vivid accounts of rapacious billionaires and the half-dozen mega-corporations that dominate the industry, pollute waterways, and exhaust farmland under the very gentle hand of government regulators. In the final section, the author explores a few solutions, but she is skeptical that alternative protein will ever upend traditional industrial systems. She describes a dozen entrepreneurs and their protein alternatives, but “meat alternatives accounted for 0.2 percent of 2020 grocery meat sales.” Money is rarely their main problem because this is a trendy field for venture capitalists (even the industry giants are researching this area), but investors nearly always value profit over saving the environment, and many of their products are far from organic, requiring industrial farmed inputs, chemicals, and pesticides.
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-04-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.
A guide for women seeking to pursue their dreams without relying on alcohol.
Boulder, Colorado-based Allison is an entrepreneur, author, and business consultant who joined the Juicy AF alcohol-free community in 1999—“a community of like-minded, accomplished women supporting each other in living their best alcohol-free lives.” Since then, she’s aimed to help women in all stages of sobriety to halt the “drinking-remorse-drinking spiral” and embrace joyful futures. Her book effectively shows the hard-hitting and long-lasting impact of alcohol on the lives of people who can’t control their drinking—especially those of high-functioning, high-achieving women who believe that alcoholism mainly affects men. The book is organized into three parts, focusing on assessing one’s current relationship with alcohol, learning how to plan for alcohol-free life, and reimagining a new life from a spiritual standpoint. Allison offers revealing stories about her own struggles with binge-drinking and alcohol addiction as an outwardly successful woman who seemed to “have it all together.” She invites women to ask themselves if alcohol truly serves them, using interactive exercises, and then gives actionable advice for sticky situations, such as how to turn down drinks at stressful gatherings. The book’s latter half details how to apply spiritual laws to one’s life, so that the reinvented version of you has staying power. These laws include lessons on how to visualize one’s path, substitute behaviors, take direct action, practice forgiveness, and find community. Overall, this book is an excellent alcohol-awakening guide for women, including those readers who simply want to take stock of the role that alcohol is currently playing in their lives. The work is consistently positive, fun, and fast-paced, while also applying the pressure that many people need early in their sobriety journeys. It serves a demographic that’s long been underserved in the alcohol-free space, and brings a fresh, dynamic perspective.
A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 135
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
