Solid advice for healthy eating, but lacks Pollan’s arrestingly original journalistic flair.
An anemic follow-up to The Omnivore’s Dilemma examines food in a nutritional rather than an environmental context.
As Pollan (Science and Environmental Journalism/Univ. of California, Berkeley) acknowledges on the first page, his thesis is simple. “Eat food,” he writes. “Not too much. Mostly plants.” Of course it’s not as easy as all that. Like many modern nutritionists, Pollan is critical of what he calls the Western diet, which has been responsible for widespread obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer. To blame for this, Pollan argues, is the fact that in the last century in particular, Western societies have replaced natural, whole foods with processed food products increasingly loaded with sugars, fats and sodium. We have rationalized these decisions not only by blaming cultural changes, efficiency and convenience, but also by pitting the damages against one another in a health war. Blaming fats, for example, takes the pressure off of carbohydrates, and vice versa. But hope is not lost, says the author. With a newfound emphasis on locally grown agriculture and organic farming, Pollan claims that it is more possible than ever to avoid the problems of the Western diet without sacrificing quality of life. The author backs his theories with a variety of research, including a particularly compelling study from 1982 that sent Westernized Aborigines in Western Australia back to their natural diet in the outback, and found a drastic reduction in every typically Western health problem. While his research is sound and well-organized, the academic, secondary source–reliant text lacks the punch of the author’s usual hands-on approach.
Solid advice for healthy eating, but lacks Pollan’s arrestingly original journalistic flair.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-145-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Regush has hold of a real story here, but his account, while mildly diverting, is too sketchy and jumbled for all but the...
A lightweight look into a medical mystery: Could human herpes virus 6 (HHV6) be the culprit in numerous serious human
ills? Journalist Regush (ABC News) offers a patchy narrative: profiles of scientific investigators, reflections on the research process (including politics and funding), some scientific instruction on the ways of viruses, and hair-raising case histories. HHV6 was first identified in 1987 by scientists at the National Cancer Institute; HIV researcher Robert Gallo once suggested that the virus might be a co-factor speeding up HIV’s attack on the immune system. According to Regush, HHV6 may also be involved in multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and secondary infections in children with roseola. Regush principally—and sometimes breathlessly—follows the employment and funding tribulations of Wisconsin researchers Konnie Knox and Donald Carrigan ("Science was his life, and nothing was more exciting to him than systematically following a set of clues"). He reflects throughout on the research process: "Baggage that can cripple innovation," he points out, includes "a slavish loyalty to a particular theory, indebtedness to a sponsor with a stake in research results, and an all-around fear of offending anyone in authority."
Regush has hold of a real story here, but his account, while mildly diverting, is too sketchy and jumbled for all but the most casual reader.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-525-94534-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
This testament to the pain of infertility and the promise of reproductive technology relentlessly accentuates the positive even as it describes the utter desperation of couples who are willing to do whatever it takes to have a child. It’s not that Zouves, who is medical director at the San Francisco—based Pacific Fertility Center—one of the few in the country to offer its clients a money-back guarantee—is blind to what his patients are going through. On the contrary, he does an excellent job of recounting the physical, emotional, and financial toll that infertility treatment can take on his patients and their families. It’s just that in a book that considers every possible obstacle to having a baby—advanced age, endometriosis, fibroids, cancer, vasectomy, low sperm count and/or motility, immune system problems, to name just a few—nearly every couple depicted here emerges from the infertility ordeal with at least one healthy newborn. To be sure, most of them had to go pretty far afield; many underwent multiple cycles of in vitro fertilization, others had to rely on sperm or egg donors. Some even resorted to surrogates. The details of their treatment are described unflinchingly: hundreds of hormone shots, multiple miscarriages, the heartbreak of being “a little bit pregnant!” after embryos are implanted, only to have the “pregnancy” vanish, and the irony of “selective reduction,” i.e., aborting one or more fetuses when fertility treatments work too well. For those grappling with infertility, Zouves’s work, which makes the intricacies of biology understandable to the lay reader, offers a useful primer on cutting-edge science. And while it holds out much-needed hope to those who yearn for children, the book would have been more valuable had it reflected the reality that miracles do not happen every day.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-6046-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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