From the editors of American Health magazine comes this combination cookbook and food guide, arranged by 27 categories of foods (wheat; the ``new'' grains; soy foods; fish; meat; fruit, etc.), each of which gets a general report on its nutritional or medicinal qualities, then general cooking advice and a sampling of health-conscious recipes—over 250 in all. The division of foods into categories defies logic—along with the broad headings listed above, there are entire separate sections devoted, for example, to mushrooms and ginger—but no harm is done. The nutrition reports are balanced and sensible on such hot topics as meat and coffee, and they generally highlight without exaggeration findings of anticancer and antiheart-disease properties of a whole range of foods. For what it's worth, there's also an interesting list of medicinal values of a variety of herbal teas. The recipes, from various sources (including Marian Burros and the Four Seasons Spa menu), are generally decent and uncomplicated if unexciting—in the aggregate they smack of contrived, service-magazine origins. The book ends with a table of ``profiles,'' one-paragraph descriptions plus nutrient profiles taken from USDA tables, on the foods already covered. Uninspired, but sound and handy. (Sixteen pages of color photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-24908-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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