Vigorous, accessible advocacy for nutritional therapy and a possible method to achieve optimal health outcomes.
A guide touts the controversial medical benefits of bovine colostrum.
In this book’s opening statement, Wyatt asserts that modern medicine is due for some fundamental changes in the way it’s taught and practiced in America. He writes that the misuse and overuse of medications lead to drug abuse and that a “return to basics and common sense” is very much in order. The author believes in the power of the “living, breathing pharmaceutical factory” known as the cow to deliver the lifesaving antibacterial and antiviral properties found in bovine colostrum, a unique, bioactive dairy secretion from the animal’s udders during the first few days after giving birth. Throughout his narrative, Wyatt references his wife, Kaye, who suffered from immune dysfunction for most of her life as a result of biological imbalances and chronic immunodeficiency. In a series of intriguing chapters discussing colostrum’s ancient history as an Egyptian “elixir of metamorphosis” and statistical data and clinical trials that demonstrate its anti-inflammatory, regenerative, and microbiome rebalancing properties, Wyatt explores how passive immunity can be obtained from nutrients and antibodies found in the secretion. He also details the arduous process of bringing colostrum in some form to the retail market. First introduced to its purported benefits by a colleague, the author vividly describes the dramatic effects the supplement had once his wife began ingesting it and how both were enchanted by this unorthodox remedy. The book chronicles Wyatt’s inspired, yearslong determination to heal his wife with colostrum. He considers himself and Kaye to be “pioneers of colostrum”; they established a nonprofit research organization on its behalf. Despite Kaye’s death, the author continues to promote what he claims is a key factor in human immune system resiliency. A military veteran, son of an herbalist, and grandson of an Idaho cattle rancher, Wyatt has no medical training or clinical experience. But the author’s thorough, clinically supported research and passionate treatment of what he calls an “ancient health remedy” will snag readers’ attention from the first page. With a section of informative guides, lists of bioactive components, and even recipes using powdered colostrum, his book will certainly inspire interest in further research by readers inclined to know more about this radical dietary supplement.
Vigorous, accessible advocacy for nutritional therapy and a possible method to achieve optimal health outcomes.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-736322-1-9
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Vibrant Life Institute
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
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