An astute, highly informative food exposé that educates without bias, leaving the culinary decision-making to readers.
A gastronomic study of the gradual integration of organic food choices into public consumption.
San Francisco Chronicle James Beard Award–winning food journalist Kauffman, who worked as a line cook, gives overdue credit to an organic agricultural movement whose popularity spread like wildfire in the 1970s. He digs deeply into the evolution of the hippie counterculture and how particular foods became staples and how they were included on dinner tables across the world. Raised in the 1970s in an “ultraliberal” Mennonite community, the author writes that his family’s diet changed forever with the incorporation of the “earthy, fresh, and none too complex” foods featured in a 1976 copy of home economist Doris Janzen Longacre’s More-With-Less Cookbook. This ideal entails stripping cuisine “back to its preindustrial roots,” without pesticides, packaging, additives, or processing and devoid of meat. Kauffman tackles this subject journalistically, with interviews and commentary from the chefs and food co-op employees who became part of a larger movement to change the direction of the global diet while remaining mindful of its ecological footprint. He shows how formerly “fringe” foods like alfalfa sprouts, tofu, granola, carob, brown rice, and whole-wheat breads were popularized by the Southern California health-food and vitamin scene in the 1960s, as well as the “exotic” macrobiotic and whole food diets that proliferated in places like the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. Moving forward, the author further analyzes the ways these naturally sourced foods developed into a distinctive cuisine touting both eco-friendly and mind-body benefits, and he documents the nationwide natural food revolution through the voices of organic farmers, homesteaders, and innovative vegetarian cooks. In an intelligently written narrative refreshingly free of personal admonitions or detractions, Kauffman comprehensively presents the history and the momentum of the organic food revolution while foraging for the keys to its increasing desirability and crossover appeal.
An astute, highly informative food exposé that educates without bias, leaving the culinary decision-making to readers.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243730-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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