A must-read book for diabetics, but doctors will also learn a lot.
The author of The Case Against Sugar and Why We Get Fat returns with an investigation of diabetes.
Taubes, a three-time winner of the Science in Society Journalism Award, explains that insulin allows cells to use sugars (i.e., carbohydrates) for energy. Diabetes results when insulin loses this ability. In Type 1 diabetes, usually beginning in childhood, the body produces little or no insulin. Type 2, which occurs later in life, is associated with obesity, and weight control is the best treatment. Until the discovery of insulin in 1921, a low-carbohydrate, low-calorie diet prolonged lives. The use of insulin seemed to work miracles; patients rose from significant illness and resumed normal lives. Doctors continued to prescribe the same “diabetic” diet, but they quickly learned that patients rarely followed it. Doctors fumed but accepted reality and decided to “cover” the increased carbohydrates and calories with insulin and other drugs. That remains the standard treatment today. However, by the 1930s, even well-controlled diabetics were developing heart disease, kidney failure, strokes, blindness, blocked arteries, and other maladies. Decades later, we are experiencing an obesity epidemic, a 600% increase in diabetes (between the early 1960s and 2015), an outpouring of drugs meant to normalize blood sugar, and numerous studies to determine if this could prevent these complications. The author also examines “the demonization of fat.” Faced with skyrocketing heart attacks in the general population, experts condemned America’s typical high-cholesterol, high-fat diet. In 1971, the American Diabetic Association “began prescribing carbohydrate-rich/low-fat diets for diabetic patients largely because this is what the American Heart Association was suggesting for effectively all Americans.” Taubes is blunt: “They were wrong.” Although the ADA has softened its condemnation of fats, which diabetics can metabolize, it continues to encourage carbohydrates, which they can’t without pharmaceutical help.
A must-read book for diabetics, but doctors will also learn a lot.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780525520085
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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