Full of hard facts, good science and excellent illustrations, this is the bomb–and just the thing for crafting the stuff of...
A sticky, satisfying vade mecum, and a horticulturally sound guide to producing tasty bud–for medical purposes only, of course.
In these complicated times, the Cultivator’s Handbook of Marijuana (1986), favorite of the Whole Earth crowd and an erstwhile bible, all simple line drawings and hippie encouragement, gives way to Cervantes’s careful science ("Near the end of normal vegetative growth, plants grown from seed develop pre-flowers. This is when female calyx formation initiates, and it is not contingent upon photoperiod") and consumer-advocate field testing ("Be careful when purchasing ballasts that are made in China or Asia, in general. . .. Cheap transformers, capacitors, and starters are cheap because they are of inferior quality"). The prose is rich in information but never dense or unreadable, while the photographs are a blend of High Times and Playboy, with a touch of THX 1138 thrown in for good measure. (We’re talking the white Visqueen that lines the grow room, man. Don’t freak. And whatever you do, don’t think of Soylent Green.) Of course, Cervantes knows that the sap-dripping, ever-so-healthy plants thus portrayed are no-nos, which explains his helpful checklist for avoiding The Man: Keep to a regular schedule, be pleasant but brief with the neighbors, use a friend’s car to visit the grow store and "Never open the grow room door for anybody!" It takes more than all that, though, since The Man has access to all kinds of technological sniffing and profiling toys, so Cervantes includes some nifty tips for shielding the grow room from escaping light, heat signatures, ozone smells and all those other cannabis-related giveaways. And the portraits of various hydroponic and grow-light setups are a real inspiration to do-it-yourself types.
Full of hard facts, good science and excellent illustrations, this is the bomb–and just the thing for crafting the stuff of righteous bombers. For medical purposes only, of course.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 187882323X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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