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GOOD FOOD GRATITUDE

A photo-filled cookbook that effectively combines vegan food with lifestyle tips.

Awards & Accolades

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Homestyle vegan recipes from a Hawaii-based chef.

Hawaii is the former owner of Caffe Coco in Kauai, Hawaii, and in this debut book, she combines health-forward recipes with a family-friendly approach to cooking. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, the author studied at Le Cordon Bleu and adopted a vegan diet after reading Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin’s book Skinny Bitch (2005). Like Barnouin, the author is a former model: “During my brief modeling career,” Hawaii writes, “I used food to keep my body at a certain weight (it was during the unhealthy waif craze), and my relationship with food became blurred.” This cookbook, she explains, “is a culmination of my journey toward healthfulness.” At the end of 2017, Hawaii sold her cafe so she “could complete this book, write more books, create videos, and teach what I have learned along the way.” The recipes here, featuring plenty of full-color images by multiple photographers, are simple and easy to follow, running the gamut from nut milks and fruit juices to dinner items and desserts. There’s plenty of emphasis on health-conscious vegan foods, including ginger shots, tofu scrambles, and smoothies. But Hawaii also includes a wide range of simple, homestyle dishes, such as sandwiches, soups, and dips. Other notable recipes include her “Coconut Mac Nut Tofu,” the signature dish at her cafe—“It is a great way to get your family to fall in love with tofu”—and a San Francisco avocado sub, inspired by her Bay Area upbringing. “I want my kids’ diet to seem normal, even though we eat vegan,” Hawaii writes, which means plenty of familiar breakfast and dinner foods, from waffles to quesadillas. Recipes also helpfully note whether they’re gluten-free, nut-free, or sugar-free. There’s a useful section on dressings—from Hawaiian Island to Cashew Caesar—and sauces, and Hawaii offers practical advice in the closing pages, which range from her preferences regarding organic brands to a list of her cooking appliances. Although this cookbook doesn’t break any new culinary ground, it’s easy to read and ideal for people who want to eat simply and healthily.

A photo-filled cookbook that effectively combines vegan food with lifestyle tips.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-9857152-7-4

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Deeper Well Publishing

Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

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IN MY PLACE

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

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

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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