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
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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