It’ll help to have Econ 101 under your belt to appreciate this book, but it makes for fine foodie entertainment.
Economist Chang takes an offbeat approach to the dismal—but delicious—science.
Born in Korea, the author studied in England at a time when the food was inarguably awful. Yet even in the land of toad in the hole and bubble and squeak, global trends began to break through. “With increase in international trade, international migration and international travel,” writes Chang, “people everywhere have become more curious about and open to foreign foods.” So it is that Britain became a multiflavored nation even at a time when economics became monocultural. Using foodstuffs as metaphors as much as things in and of themselves, Chang examines them in the light of economic history. Okra, for example, came from Africa on the Middle Passage, affording the author an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of enslaved Africans not just to the antebellum economy, but also to present-day wealth. Without tobacco and cotton revenues, he writes, America would have never become an industrial marvel. The author also clearly enumerates how developing nations have been repeatedly victimized by colonialism and have an indolent if rapacious ruling class (“unproductive landlords, undynamic capitalist class, vision-less and corrupt political leaders”). Moreover, he adds, many key exports such as cochineal and indigo became valueless once European labs figured out how to make even less expensive synthetic versions. Switzerland is the site of many of these labs. However, in a chapter about chocolate, Chang notes that it’s incorrect to think it’s a service-based economy: “Switzerland is actually the most industrialized economy in the world, producing the largest amount of manufacturing output per person,” whether chocolate or machine parts. Writing gamely and with admirable lucidity, Chang concludes with another metaphor, urging that “the best economists should be, like the best of the cooks, able to combine different theories to have a more balanced view.”
It’ll help to have Econ 101 under your belt to appreciate this book, but it makes for fine foodie entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781541700543
Page Count: 224
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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