McQuaid is an enthusiastic writer undisturbed by dead ends, and he provides an entertaining exploration of “the mystery at...
“Pleasure is never very far from aversion; this is a feature of our anatomy and behavior. In the brain, the two closely overlap.” So writes Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist McQuaid (Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, 2006, etc.) in this provocative investigatory foray into the nature of taste.
The author begins with a debunking of the still-practiced basic geography of the tongue that identifies—spuriously—zones for the five basic tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. As he notes, every taste bud has five receptors waiting to be tickled and “detect molecules of one of the basic tastes.” Though eating is as important as reproducing, it has been significantly less studied in the scientific community, from isolating taste receptors to finding the genes in the genome that play critical roles. “Like other senses,” writes the author, “[flavor is] programmed by genes; unlike them, it is also protean, molded by experience and social cues, changing over the course of a lifetime. This plasticity is wild and unpredictable.” McQuaid examines flavor chemistry and perception, and he notes that our fields of taste are oddly individual, both within and without our communities—though availability obviously plays a role in diet. The author is especially interesting when noting certain oddments and curios: the berry that turns the tastes around in our mouth; the sugar trap; the creepy, brave new world of the bland milkshakelike drink that does it all, “Soylent” (created through research into “the human body’s nutritional needs” to create “the perfect food, building it from first principles”); the advent of cooking; and the arrival of alcohol.
McQuaid is an enthusiastic writer undisturbed by dead ends, and he provides an entertaining exploration of “the mystery at the heart of flavor,” which “has never truly been cracked.”Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1451685008
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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