A useful, if not original, statement of the centrality of food production to our way of life that could have benefited from...
An argument that “modern industrial farming amounts to one of the most destructive enterprises on the planet.”
According to Brownlee, the co-founder of the nonprofit advocacy group Local Food Shift and co-publisher of its eponymous magazine, the bonds of community are weakened when family farmers are replaced by large corporations motivated solely by profit. The author offers the persuasive argument that even though corporate farming reliably delivers low-cost, abundant food, it degrades the environment and strips food of nutritional value. Brownlee believes that a food revolution, modeled on the 1960s civil rights movement, can change this. A first step, he writes, is to organize “an independent and parallel system” to market local produce while pressuring supermarkets to provide shelf space. This type of massive undertaking would entail meticulous organization of broad-based community support. Brownlee describes how he and a group of fellow activists launched the Boulder County Going Local! campaign on March 15, 2007, at a meeting attended by 250 people. They focused on the perilous state of the environment to mobilize support for local food producers. Their hope—that within 10 years, food grown in Boulder County would account for 25 percent of the market—proved to be overly optimistic, but the author and his associates have not given up the fight. They have engaged in national outreach to similar organizations and have broadened their perspective to include a spiritual dimension to their message, which pops up somewhat awkwardly throughout the narrative. “The fundamental design of the universe calls forth a species of cocreators…to be the vehicle through which the fourteen-billion-year process of evolution becomes not only conscious but also limitless, as if God is at last awakening in the human species,” he writes. Brownlee admits that achieving their goal is a monumental project with no guarantees of success, but it must be undertaken.
A useful, if not original, statement of the centrality of food production to our way of life that could have benefited from a more concise, organized formulation.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62317-000-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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