An insightful book that should be of interest to anyone who eats food, animal or not.
Unsentimental study of the dangers in how meat is produced and distributed around the world, particularly in the United States.
Silbergeld (Public Health/Johns Hopkins Univ.) may take a detached, academic tone toward her subject, but she has immersed herself deeply in the world of factory farms. Her reports from the “Broiler Belt” of Delmarva—the Chesapeake Bay intersection of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, where a substantial portion of the nation’s chickens are raised—paint a credible picture of a system that has spun out of control. The author steadfastly sticks to a middle path that is likely to displease both those who long to return to an earlier, pastoral model of agriculture and those who would like to see as little government regulation of farming as possible. Silbergeld argues that, whether we like it or not, agriculture has become an industry and ought to be treated as such, which means much more government oversight than is currently in place. As the author points out, the rapid increase in “chickenization”—a term coined by the United States Department of Agriculture “to describe the global diffusion of industrial methods of food animal production”—has caused a number of problems, including worker safety issues and the disposal of vast quantities of concentrated waste. Of particular concern, she feels, is the amount of antimicrobials fed to chickens and other poultry and passed along to the humans who eat them, leading to the creation of drug-resistant bacteria. She carefully unravels the history of adding antimicrobials to feed and makes a convincing case that they do little to prevent infection—cleaning the poultry houses is far more effective—and that they are “risking the loss of the crown jewel of modern medicine, the ability to prevent and cure deadly infections with antimicrobial drugs.”
An insightful book that should be of interest to anyone who eats food, animal or not.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4214-2030-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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