With comprehensive research and intelligent, fair-minded writing, this is an informative, optimistic read.
An exploration of the backgrounds of our favorite fruits and vegetables and examination of ways to minimize the carbon impact of what we eat.
Gray is a journalist based in Scotland who specializes in food and environmental issues, and she is not afraid to get her hands dirty. Her acclaimed 2016 book, The Ethical Carnivore, recounted her year of eating meat and fish that she had killed herself. In her latest, she writes about her journey across Britain visiting farms and suppliers to track down the origins of the produce in her local supermarket—and to assess the environmental effects. “The fact is that eating most things nowadays makes us anxious,” she notes. “Never before have we had so much food to eat, watched so many cookery programs or read so many cookery books. Yet, for many people, food is not a source of joy but a source of worry.” Thankfully, the author finds plenty of positive stories, including farmers who are changing their growing practices for soil restoration, the resurgence in foraging for wild foods, and experimentation with new varieties. Gray also engagingly investigates the history of potatoes, bananas, tomatoes and, of course, avocados. She acknowledges the difficulty in working out the environmental footprint of foods, especially the carbon costs of transport, and she is wary of the emphasis that some environmental activists put on buying only locally grown food, which can hurt struggling producers in developing countries. It all makes for a complex equation requiring tolerance and trade-offs. Gray advises that readers stay informed, make the best decisions you can, keep an open mind, and don’t attack other people for their choices. She concludes each chapter with an illustrative, unusual recipe; the honey roast tomatoes on toast sounds particularly tasty.
With comprehensive research and intelligent, fair-minded writing, this is an informative, optimistic read.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781472969637
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury Wildlife
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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