A breezy culinary history that’ll work up your appetite.
How Italians became Italian through their cuisine.
Callegari, a Dartmouth University scholar and co-host of the Gola food and wine podcast, serves up staples of Italian cuisine and so much more in this delightful journey through the peninsula’s food history. She draws on a wide range of sources, from 13th-century poetry to 21st-century street art. “Guided by ingredients rather than road signs,” she sprinkles recipes throughout, including one for the timballo prepared in the movie Big Night. From its inception, food in Italy was “attentively, even manically, controlled and distributed,” she writes. Ancient Romans established a secure culinary culture rich in food and hospitality. She pauses to opine on a remarkable anchovy fish sauce and its health benefits, then moves on to the influential first Italian cookbook to appear in Europe some 700 years ago: Liber de coquina. The Renaissance saw a rise in culinary treatises, and Italy’s Jewish community has provided its own delights. Callegari discusses the “enduring importance of wine to the Italian identity,” noting that “Italy produces more wine than any other nation.” There are, of course, the “almost divine” cheeses—among them the “undisputed king”: Parmigiano Reggiano—and appreciations of Genoese pesto and the “only one true pizza: la vera pizza napoletana. She briefly touches on two Italian staples—espresso and cigarettes—and even takes up, in the U.S., the growth of the ubiquitous Olive Garden and its “never ending pasta bowl.” Americans’ love of Italian food, she argues, has much to do with Italian transplant Marcella Hazan’s influential The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973). Callegari concludes her brief tour of Italy by observing that “the only way to truly discover this place is to eat your way through it.”
A breezy culinary history that’ll work up your appetite.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781620979235
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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
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