A worthy, comprehensive exploration of supplements to improve brain function and energy.
A health science guide examines alternatives to caffeine.
At age 26, Beshara was diagnosed with a heart condition that required him to drastically cut down on his caffeine consumption. For the young business owner, the recommendation seemed impossible. “I took it for granted that coffee was the ambitious person’s best friend,” writes the debut author in his introduction, but after five years of experimentation, “I have learned about the different compounds from around the world that allow me to consume a fraction of the caffeine I used to, yet produce a multiple of the energy and productivity that coffee once delivered.” In this book, Beshara takes readers on a journey into the world of nootropics, adaptogens, mushrooms, anti-inflammatories, and other noncaffeinated methods of keeping the body energized throughout the day. Nootropics—a broad category of compounds intended to improve cognitive function that run the gamut from safe and healthy to dangerous and addictive—take up the bulk of the volume’s pages. They include alphabet soup compounds like Omega-3 EPA and Alpha-GPC as well as obscure plants like ashwagandha and bacopa monnieri. Adaptogens are destressing agents. Beshara structures the work like a series of product reviews, giving each compound or plant a sustainability score (how safe it is to consume regularly) as well as discussing how well it works and any negative side effects it might have. Panax ginseng, for example, receives a sustainability score of only three out of five (too low for the author to recommend). While this adaptogen has displayed signs of improving cognitive performance in Alzheimer’s patients, “Panax ginseng must be avoided in pregnancy. It has been shown to increase the risk of birth defects. Continuous use should also be limited to six months or less due to its hormone-like effects on the body.” Beshara’s book—written with Engle (The Concussion Repair Manual, 2017) and debut author Haynes—is short at just over 120 pages, but it features an extensive bibliography that includes the many studies on which the text is based. Those who are looking to consume less caffeine will be intrigued by this extensive list of alternatives, though nothing the work describes sounds quite as good as a regular cup of joe.
A worthy, comprehensive exploration of supplements to improve brain function and energy.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0545-9
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Monocle Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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