Still, it’s a handy gathering of facts and opinions on our ill-used bovine friends.
A historical hodgepodge of things bovid.
At the outset, Carlson (A Fever in Salem, 1999, etc.) notes that cattle ranching is today one of the great polarizing issues in world ecology, cattle being both destructive and voracious. Though she recognizes the dangers of cattle grazing in sensitive landscapes, she mostly comes down on the side of the cattle keepers in this wide-angle view of the role of ranching in human societies around the world. That role is of critical importance, she writes, for “obtaining hay and feed, building pens and barns, and learning how to preserve milk and its products has changed us far more than it has changed the bovines. One could argue that they domesticated us.” Her swift-moving narrative begins with the cave paintings of western Europe, which depict the aurochs, a wild ancestor of the modern domesticated cow; it moves along to describe attempts in Hitler’s Germany to retro-breed the aurochs, long extinct, from the wilder breeds of cattle that roam the earth today, and it considers the ethical questions associated with the modern tendency to treat cattle as food-producing machines rather than things with faces and minds. In between, the author touches on just about every possible oddment and bit of trivia that bears on cows, from political scandals surrounding the use of preservatives in the Spanish-American War to the history of margarine (“a food so sterile that no living matter can exist in it”). Carlson’s narrative is easy enough to absorb, although it often reads like an assemblage of index cards, mixing quoted and cribbed material with ill-fitting transitions. The author has relied on only a few printed sources at that, some of them erroneous and outdated: anthropologists, for instance, are no longer comfortable maintaining that cattle cultures are more egalitarian than, say, fishing societies, and it’s a stretch to suggest that women suffer from depression more than men because they eat less red meat.
Still, it’s a handy gathering of facts and opinions on our ill-used bovine friends.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2001
ISBN: 1-56663-388-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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