While not a game-changer, this book repackages familiar diet advice in a friendly, inspiring and practical format.
Cheese, chocolate and wine do have a place in a healthy lifestyle—that’s what this debut author and registered dietitian says we can learn from Europe’s longest-lived populations.
For decades, Americans looked to the traditional diets of people living around the Mediterranean as a model for healthy living—maybe not following that model but definitely chattering about it in books and media coverage. Lieberman, who spent two years living in Geneva, writes that there are plenty of lessons to be learned from other countries in Europe. Switzerland, Italy and France have some of the longest average life spans in the world, as well as low rates of obesity, heart disease and other markers of ill health. The book examines each country one by one and lays out the government’s official dietary recommendations, akin to the U.S. food pyramid, along with detailed descriptions of a typical day in the eating life of its citizens. Much of Lieberman’s background and advice will be familiar to anyone paying attention to the news: Americans are fat and getting fatter; we’re among the fattest people in the world; we eat a diet far too high in processed foods, sugar and fat; we snack too much and generally consume far too many calories. But Lieberman’s descriptions of the daily eating habits of her chosen European countries are downright inspiring: Lives marked by pleasurable outdoor exercise; a focus on local, organic foods so satisfying that they discourage overindulgence; regular leisurely sit-down meals that trump Americans’ predilection for on-the-go snacking; and, of course, daily indulgences in delicate portions (a square of good dark chocolate, a scoop of gelato, a single biscotto alongside a cup of coffee). It all sounds too romantic to be true, but Lieberman has lived it and brings an infectious enthusiasm to her writing. She concludes each chapter with a list of actionable tips for a European makeover of stateside eating habits and concludes the book with 70 pages of simple recipes, heavy on the whole grains, veggies and lean meats.
While not a game-changer, this book repackages familiar diet advice in a friendly, inspiring and practical format.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989181211
Page Count: 280
Publisher: WorldRD LLC.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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