Nonetheless, the point zings home: The food industry knows how to sell; now it has to sell the right thing.
Former food-industry executive and current anti-obesity advocate Cardello calls on his erstwhile colleagues to become custodians of their customers’ well-being.
Few would deny that obesity is a plague on the land. The question is, what to do about it? The author's answer: Let the food industry clean up the disaster it facilitated. Can the perpetrators reform? Certainly, asserts Cardello, because they won’t be surrendering what is most important to them—a fat bottom line. As he points out, they can easily make healthier, just-as-tasty versions of the stuff they now sell, which is slowly killing the hand that feeds that bottom line. Given their lack of table discipline and impulse control, consumers currently inhaling bacon cheeseburgers and washing them down with another 48-ounce soda aren’t the answer, Cardello concludes. Nor is the government, which has been at best inept and at worst utterly bewildering regarding food healthiness. Least of all can various agenda-driven groups be trusted to come up with anything other than bad science and pettifogging. Only industry has access to the resources, research and infrastructure to immediately fashion foods offering less caloric and greater nutritional intake, declares the author. All it needs is a mindset that fosters responsible behavior. Will customers, traditionally suspicious of flavorless “healthy” foods, go for the improved regimen? Why even tell them? Cardello proposes a simple switcheroo: “Making a food or beverage more nutritious without bragging about it to the consumer. In fact, keeping consumers in the dark about these improvements might be an even bigger advantage.” This Big Brotherish approach raises a number of questions. Do flavorings themselves have potential health hazards? Where’s the oversight? Who decides what’s healthful or not? In addition, the subject of healthy food by ineluctable extension requires addressing environmental and agricultural policy issues, which Cardello avoids.
Nonetheless, the point zings home: The food industry knows how to sell; now it has to sell the right thing.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-136386-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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
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