An eye-opening and intimate study of what families eat and why.
Food, families, and motherhood in America.
Making an insightful book debut, sociologist and ethnographer Fielding-Singh brings her perspective as a biracial, South Asian American woman, and concerned mother, to this well-researched look at food choices among racially, ethnically, and economically diverse families. Based on interviews with 75 families and extended observations of four families’ daily lives, the book questions the assumption that food inequality can be “completely explained by the fact that healthy food was more expensive and farther away from lower-income folks than wealthier ones.” Parents across society, she discovered, “undertake sacrificial, complicated, and frustrating work to feed kids.” None lived in a “food desert” without access to affordable, healthy food, but there was a definite difference in the kinds of markets they frequented—Whole Foods vs. Costco—and the amounts they were able to spend, from less than $200 a month to over $1,000. Feeding fell largely to mothers, who all expressed concern about their children’s nutrition. Nevertheless, mothers who had to deny many of their children’s desires because of financial straits were likely to give in when it came to junk food, spending money on the chips and sugared cereal their children clamored for instead of fruits and vegetables. Lack of time, children’s pickiness, and food industry advertising all shaped what mothers put on the table. Fielding-Singh incisively explores “racist narratives pervading dietary discourses” that associate certain foods with Black and Latinx families, fetishizing kale rather than collard greens, for example, as well as how privileged mothers were “constantly ratcheting up the standards by which they evaluated their kids’ diets and themselves as moms.” To overcome food inequality, Fielding-Singh suggests—in addition to a living wage and affordable housing—incentive programs, which would stretch federal-assistance dollars for the purchase of more nutritious foods; improving the national school lunch program; and banning the food industry from marketing to children.
An eye-opening and intimate study of what families eat and why.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-42726-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Informative but largely unsurprising.
Out of the White House, Trump rages.
McGraw, a national political correspondent at Politico, makes her book debut with a close look at Trump’s life as ex-president, much of the time spent at Mar-a-Lago, his “decadent, sprawling, gilded mansion on the sea.” Trump bought the estate in 1985, converting it 10 years later into a posh club and resort, where “membership costs hundreds of thousands of dollars up front, plus annual fees of $14,000.” Drawing on interviews with politicians and aides, source notes from her reporting, and published articles, McGraw reveals Trump denying his presidential loss and plotting ways to burnish his political clout. He constantly whipped up conspiracy theories. Frustrated after being banned from Twitter, he founded Trump Media LLC to give him an internet presence in Truth Social, and he encouraged Republicans to grovel for his backing in upcoming races. “Believing—or at least peddling—Trump’s falsehoods about the election,” McGraw writes, was “a litmus test for a Trump endorsement.” Republicans who had voted for his impeachment were targeted for defeat. The much-publicized FBI raid of his premises in the summer of 2022 proved a fundraising boon. “More than ever,” writes the author, “he would become his own rallying cry. I am suffering for you would become his gospel.” McGraw chronicles Trump’s fury over books warning against the perils of another Trump presidency, as he kept close tabs on who was—and wasn’t—defending him. He dubbed the Jan. 6 committee the “Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs.” He refused to take the blame for Republicans’ poor showing in the midterms, “the worst performance by an out of power party in decades.” McGraw ends with his victory in the Iowa caucuses, auguring the dismaying prospect of another Trump presidency, fueled by his desire for apocalyptic revenge.
Informative but largely unsurprising.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593729632
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.
The nameless resister inside the White House speaks.
“The character of one man has widened the chasms of American political division,” writes Anonymous. Indeed. The Trump years will not be remembered well—not by voters, not by history since the man in charge “couldn’t focus on governing, and he was prone to abuses of power, from ill-conceived schemes to punish his political rivals to a propensity for undermining vital American institutions.” Given all that, writes the author, and given Trump’s bizarre behavior and well-known grudges—e.g., he ordered that federal flags be raised to full staff only a day after John McCain died, an act that insiders warned him would be construed as petty—it was only patriotic to try to save the country from the man even as the resistance movement within the West Wing simultaneously tried to save Trump’s presidency. However, that they tried did not mean they succeeded: The warning of the title consists in large part of an extended observation that Trump has removed the very people most capable of guiding him to correct action, and the “reasonable professionals” are becoming ever fewer in the absence of John Kelly and others. So unwilling are those professionals to taint their reputations by serving Trump, in fact, that many critical government posts are filled by “acting” secretaries, directors, and so forth. And those insiders abetting Trump are shrinking in number even as Trump stumbles from point to point, declaring victory over the Islamic State group (“People are going to fucking die because of this,” said one top aide) and denouncing the legitimacy of the process that is now grinding toward impeachment. However, writes the author, removal from office is not the answer, not least because Trump may not leave without trying to stir up a civil war. Voting him out is the only solution, writes Anonymous; meanwhile, we’re stuck with a president whose acts, by the resisters’ reckoning, are equal parts stupid, illegal, or impossible to enact.
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1846-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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