A disquieting, highly effective assault on the American way of producing and eating food. The daily news is full—but not full enough, in freelance journalist Fox's view—of stories about mad cow disease, outbreaks of food poisoning at fast-food restaurants, and biogenetic experimentation. The media, Fox holds, are seriously underreporting the threat that current methods of food manufacture and distribution pose to health. ``The incidence of foodborne illness has been growing for some time,'' she writes, citing Centers for Disease Control figures that put the food-poisoning count alone at more than 81 million cases a year; E. coli 0157:H7, a particularly nasty bacterium, alone causes as many as 20,000 illnesses each year, killing between 250 and 500 Americans. It is no longer safe, she points out, to eat the skins of uncooked vegetables, no longer safe to eat eggs, perhaps even no longer safe to eat hamburger. It's something of an irony, Fox slyly remarks, that with our abundance of food choices—the average supermarket today stocks 25,000-odd items, against the 300 a store held in 1950—we should have to worry so much about what we eat. But we do, and the causes are many. With advances in transportation, refrigeration, chemical engineering, and industrial agriculture, our foods come farther and farther from their sources, and at all seasons, an unnatural state of affairs never before seen in human history. In the meanwhile, bacteria are getting smarter, evolving to survive efforts to contain them. Salmonella, Fox writes, now can survive in eggs boiled for as much as eight minutes, ``bad news indeed for egg lovers, for home cooks everywhere, and certainly for chefs—if they read obscure medical journals.'' Her prose is a little ungainly, and her case studies are sometimes repetitive, but Fox's book will make you think twice about the foods you buy and consume. A first-rate work of journalism in the public interest.
Pub Date: July 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-01980-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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