An exuberant, health-positive guide for readers eager to reform their eating habits.
Practical dietary advice from a medical doctor—with inspiration from Einstein.
Retired Florida physician Beecham’s debut, the inaugural volume in his four-part LivingLIFE series, employs a unique approach to healthy eating through smarter food selections. Beecham notes that he, in retirement, was 65 pounds overweight from a cycle of “eating protein bars, drinking diet soda,” and suffering from food allergies. Devising an unconventional new methodology to a smart diet, Beecham explored the universal wisdom of Albert Einstein to address the age-old problem of unhealthy eating habits. A crisp, brightly hued palette and enticing photographs enhance Beecham’s message, which begins with rational, common-sense declarations about how we live and the limitations that often govern our ability to change. Breaking free from these limitations, he writes, will allow consumers to make better food choices. The book utilizes Einstein’s way of “looking into nature” to explain misleading claims about cholesterol, the “lectin” toxicity of edible grains, and ways sugary items and bread can sabotage the appetite. Examining the eating habits of the healthiest populations, like those on the Pacific Islands, he writes, reveals new directions to investigate, such as eliminating inflammation-inducing wheat products and nightshade berries, like tomatoes, okra, peppers, and eggplant. Instead, vegetables such as Asian sweet potatoes are more beneficial to incorporate into one’s diet, Beecham advises. He also offers more rudimentary information on how the body stores energy, fat, proteins, and omega fats. The author correlates Einstein’s relativity theory to several “thought experiments” about how advertising and popular food choices influence consumption patterns. Sections detailing the healthy habits of Kitava Island inhabitants in the Pacific and probiotics translate as more relatable than promoting a dairy-free diet with homemade mashed banana and coconut oil ice cream. Though nothing particularly revolutionary or new is presented here, Beecham provides doable guidelines for living more healthfully through improved dietary alternatives.
An exuberant, health-positive guide for readers eager to reform their eating habits.Pub Date: March 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-980365-83-9
Page Count: 124
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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