Easy and healthy recipes are the highlight of this book focusing on health and nutrition.
Sidhartha offers a guide to healthy eating and body care combined with a cookbook of nutritional recipes.
The author has almost three decades of medical practice experience, and it shows. Sidhartha’s primercontains a lot of information about a lot of eating-related subjects, including chapters on overeating, cancer, diabetes, heart health, aging, the gut, auto-immune diseases, bones and muscles, the brain, and pregnancy. Within each chapter is a treasure trove of knowledge explaining how the body works, what might make it go wrong, and, most importantly, steps to take to avoid that happening. The text is presented in a format that turns out to be a bit awkward; it takes the form of a dialogue between people asking questions about their bodies, with a representative human body (identified as “B”) answering them. (“J: I think I am ready. B: For? J: To make some changes in how I take care of myself. B: I am all ears. Why would you want to do that?”) Though the conceit grows tiresome, within the dialogues are helpful lists and tips on topics such as stopping food cravings, the benefits of eating colorful fruits and vegetables, and an acronym (MOST) to help protect against Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. The guide ultimately morphs into a cookbook, offering dozens of recipes for healthy breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert options. The dishes include Kale and Mushroom Omelet, Simple Bean Burgers, and Sesame Noodle Bowl. Though the medical and nutritional segments of the book are informative, that info is watered down by the dialogue device used throughout the book. It’s presumably meant to impart technical information in an easily digestible way, but it comes off as contrived and often superfluous. The real strength here is the cookbook section, which isn’t even hinted at in the title of the book; the recipes are healthy and quite tasty.
Easy and healthy recipes are the highlight of this book focusing on health and nutrition.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781963609844
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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