More food for thought from a veteran agricultural activist.
In his previous work (Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, 2008), Winne established that hungry America isn’t feeding its masses nutritiously nor eco-consciously enough. He continues this theme with an apocalyptic opening sequence in which, in the year 2020, a dystopian world succumbs to food conglomerates and mega-processing plants while the environment simmers in a global-warming oven. There’s two camps in the increasingly complicated food wars—industrialized, overprocessed cuisine competes with “alternative,” “good food” that harms neither environment nor human and is at the forefront of the locavore movement. The author crunches the numbers to reveal positive progress. An increasing percentage of grocery companies are using hormone-free animal products and locally grown produce, but these developments, Winne writes, are impeded by factors like the population boom, changing diets, prices and climates. The author’s references to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dostoevsky, broadcaster Charles Kuralt and newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman fortifies his research when paired with informative case studies and excursions to food initiatives in Cleveland, Maine, New Mexico and the empowering Austin, Texas–based cooking and nutrition-educational program, Happy Kitchens. Winne firmly believes that “institutional forces are working feverishly to influence our food systems” to a detrimental degree, but the mention of his own intrinsic humanity is refreshingly relevant: “I eat meat because I have yet to find much in life that competes with a tender rib eye accompanied by a good bottle of zinfandel.” Thankfully, the author doesn’t provide all bad news, and his examination challenges readers to galvanize and bolster reform efforts and, by example, continue the revolutionary concept of “food sovereignty” for American consumers.
A good combination of solid research and affirmative testimonials.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4733-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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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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