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THE CASE FOR KETO

Name: THE CASE FOR KETO
Author: Gary Taubes
ISBN: 978-0-525-52006-1

RETHINKING WEIGHT CONTROL AND THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF LOW-CARB/HIGH-FAT EATING

by Gary Taubes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 29, 2020

Solid science and energetic writing make the author’s bitter pill easier to swallow.

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Want to lose weight? Then eat lots of meat, the much-vaunted ancestral diet. “This book is a work of journalism masquerading as a self-help book,” writes science and nutrition journalist Taubes at the outset, explaining that he does not concern himself with specific recipes so much as nutritional science. For some people, a diet of grains and tubers is fine, but for most of us, specific categories of food—particularly carbohydrates—create a “hormonal milieu” in the body that serves to trap calories in the form of fat for later use rather than burning them off as fuel in the short term. The caloric equivalent of a single almond per day is enough to foster a 50-pound weight gain over a couple of decades, which means that a diet that eschews carbohydrates is the only way the heavy among us are ever going to lose weight. Taubes examines the history of obesity and responses to it, from its being characterized as the product of a mental disorder to the counsel of “almost invariably lean people” that the trick is simply not to eat so much. Instead, because people are metabolically different from one another, one person can eat exactly the same food in exactly the same quantity as another, and one will gain weight and the other not. The deeper science concerns how the body produces and uses insulin; “eating less and exercising…can be inefficient ways of lowering insulin levels,” writes the author. Instead, only a keto diet will do, keto meaning ketosis, the burning of fat as fuel. Moderation doesn’t work for most people, argues Taubes: It’s an all-or-nothing commitment to eating meat, some cheese, and cruciferous vegetables—and no sugary foods, beans, spaghetti, and the like, a diet that, for some people, would make life not worth living. Solid science and energetic writing make the author’s bitter pill easier to swallow.

Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-52006-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020

Categories:

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | HEALTH & FITNESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
RETHINKING DIABETES
by Gary Taubes

- BOOK REVIEW
THE CASE AGAINST SUGAR
by Gary Taubes

- BOOK REVIEW
WHY WE GET FAT
by Gary Taubes

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THIS IS THE VOICE

by John Colapinto ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 2021

A rich trove of science and contemporary culture.

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An expert popular science account of human speech.

In his latest, New Yorker staff writer Colapinto provides an intensely researched, tightly focused, lucidly written story that is long but not too long. As the author points out, to call human speech a “miraculous feat” understates the case. All other animals “use their voices to make in-the-now proclamations about immediate survival and reproductive concerns, including expressions of fear, anger, hunger and mating urges.” Evolved perhaps 200,000 years ago, human language allows us to refer to events in the past or future and to make plans that we share with others, “to build the villages, towns, cities and nations that have given us primacy over the Planet and everything on it.” Even before birth, infants listen, their brains absorbing a dazzling array of tone, phonetics, syntax, patterns, and rules. Despite what early experts taught, language is not pre-installed in the brain at birth; babies learn it, usually accumulating a “mental dictionary” of 60,000 words by age 18. They achieve this because words are not random assemblages of digits. They carry meaning, and we are a species that craves meaning. Midway through the book, Colapinto moves from the mechanism of speech to its purpose. Darwin compared the changes languages undergo to natural selection, but the author disagrees. Over time, he maintains, changes in articulation, accent, and vocabulary have not increased but hobbled their efficiency, creating a Babel of incomprehensible tongues that pushes us apart. Observers claimed that the spread of media, from radio to the internet, would homogenize American speech, but the opposite occurred. Instant communication has combined with bitter ideological, economic, and cultural clashes to accelerate the creation of new American speech patterns. In the final chapter, Colapinto discusses political oratory, which has united Americans in the past. He gives high marks to the rhetoric of presidents such as Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan; however, like the majority of Americans, he considers Trump a divisive force.

A rich trove of science and contemporary culture.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-982128-74-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | HEALTH & FITNESS

- BOOK REVIEW
UNDONE
by John Colapinto

- BOOK REVIEW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
by John Colapinto

- BOOK REVIEW
AS NATURE MADE HIM
by John Colapinto

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BLACK HOLE SURVIVAL GUIDE

by Janna Levin ; illustrated by Lia Halloran ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2020

An enthusiastic appreciation of a spectacular astrophysical entity.

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A short, lively account of one of the oddest and most intriguing topics in astrophysics.

Levin, a Guggenheim fellow and professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, knows her subject well, but her goal is appreciation as much as education, and there is much to admire in a black hole. Before Einstein, writes the author, scientists believed that the force of gravity influenced the speed of moving objects. They also knew that light always travels at exactly the speed of light. This combination made no sense until 1915, when Einstein explained that gravity is not a force but a curving of space (really, space-time) near a body of matter. The more massive the matter, the greater it curves the space in its vicinity; other bodies that approach appear to bend or change speed when they are merely moving forward through distorted space-time. Einstein’s equations indicated that, above a certain mass, space-time would curve enough to double back on itself and disappear, but this was considered a mathematical curiosity until the 1960s, when objects that did just that began turning up: black holes. Light cannot emerge from a black hole, but it is not invisible. Large holes attract crowds of orbiting stars whose density produces frictional heating and intense radiation. No writer, Levin included, can contain their fascination with the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole where space-time doubles back. Nothing inside the event horizon, matter or radiation, can leave, and anything that enters is lost forever. Time slows near the horizon and then stops. The author’s discussions of the science behind her subject will enlighten those who have read similar books, perhaps the best being Marcia Bartusiak’s Black Hole (2015). Readers coming to black holes for the first time will share Levin’s wonder but may struggle with some of her explanations.

An enthusiastic appreciation of a spectacular astrophysical entity.