A passionate and practical overview of the importance of healthy lighting and how to achieve it.
Moore-Ede, an MD and professor at Harvard Medical School, examines the ways we illuminate our lives in this nonfiction debut.
In these pages, the author takes up a subject that will be relevant to virtually anybody who’s ever shopped for a laptop, smart tablet, or e-reader of any kind: the nature of artificial light, specifically the ways in which conventional fluorescent lighting and LED illumination can be harmful to human health, and what can be done to mitigate that harm or avoid it altogether. Moore-Ede outlines the ubiquity of the problem in our tech-saturated world: “Despite more than 20 years of scientific evidence showing that blue-rich light in the evening disrupts our circadian clocks, sleep, and health,” he writes, “we have created a world where virtually the only illumination you can buy is unchanging blue-rich light.” A good deal of the text is dedicated to explaining the nature of light and the particulars of modern lighting, but the author is also concerned with raising the profile of the problem itself, suggesting that a healthy “light diet” is “as essential for your health as the food you eat, the water you drink and the air you breathe.” Moore-Ede’s tone is clear and urgently pragmatic; readers are coached not only on making better choices about the lighting in every area of their lives, but also on determining what steps to take to guarantee better, more natural lighting. “You must be proactive,” he writes, “in asking for healthy circadian lighting in the spaces where you and your family spend significant time.” The book itself is visually inviting, full of colorful insets illustrating crisply summarized points, and includes copious resources for readers who want to follow up on the topic.
A passionate and practical overview of the importance of healthy lighting and how to achieve it.Pub Date: June 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798990686908
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Circadian Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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