A lively, highly informative exposé capped by trips to Kazakhstan and Bolivia, where Laufer settles his questions about the...
Former NBC News correspondent Laufer (Journalism/Oregon Univ.; The Elusive State of Jefferson: A Journey through the 51st State, 2013, etc.) investigates the “need to know what we’re eating and how it came to our dinner plates.”
The author became suspicious when a package of ostensibly organic walnuts from Trader Joe's tasted rancid. Checking the label, he found that they were grown in Kazakhstan. When Trader Joe's refused to reveal their provenance, his “journalist’s radar kicked in.” As someone who had reported on “the culture of bribery and corruption that lingers in most former Soviet republics,” Laufer found it unlikely that Kazakhstan was supporting a well-regulated organic food industry. Some months later, a check on the label of a can of “organic” black beans revealed that they came from Bolivia. As someone who had covered the drug trade in that region, Laufer was skeptical again. His suspicions were reinforced when an American case of fraudulent labeling made headlines: Businessman Harold Chase was convicted of passing off 4 million pounds of conventional corn as organic. In the United States, the organic sector has become a big business “worth over two dozen billion dollars a year.” At that size, it is “ripe with opportunities for hustlers,” and the certification process is flawed. Laufer interviewed the U.S. Department of Agriculture official in charge of the National Organic Program, who informed him that, due to understaffing, prosecutions are rare. For comparison purposes, the author traveled to Europe to speak with officials there and found a more regulated food industry, but loopholes and opportunities for fraud still abounded.
A lively, highly informative exposé capped by trips to Kazakhstan and Bolivia, where Laufer settles his questions about the walnuts and black beans he purchased. Now, how to fix the situation so that not all foods labeled organic are “suspect”?Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9071-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior 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 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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