Lotus root, anyone? A pleasure, and an education, for climate-conscious foodies.
Eating to fix the planet.
Working with climate journalist Kostigen, founder of the Climate Survivalist column for USA Today and author of The Green Book and Hacking Planet Earth, Downey Jr. serves up food that’s not just hip (as it surely is) but can also be useful in containing or even reversing climate change. Cool food, write the authors, is “a holistic approach to making the world a whole lot better by simply making more informed decisions about something that each and every one of us does anyway—eat.” Those informed decisions require doing a little homework—for example, chasing down sources of locally grown organic food that is appropriate to its season (no Chilean strawberries in January) and finding restaurants that are committed to the humane treatment of animals and to pesticide-free plants. Among other things, the authors counsel that seeking out “ancient grains” such as amaranth is one step to getting away from environmentally damaging mass-produced products. Perhaps curiously, they name rice among the baddies while writing that “wheat is the best cool food to eat,” but the environmental reasoning seems basically sound, even if readers with celiac disease won’t benefit much from the advice. Some of their recommendations are unremarkable—Francis Moore Lappé counseled lowering if not cutting out meat consumption half a century ago—but much is broadly practical. It’s good to know, for instance, that lentils not only pack a powerful protein punch but also have “a puny carbon footprint.” Scattered liberally throughout the vibrant graphics-heavy book are various delightful recipes, including lentil and tomato dahl with whole-meal roti bread, which ticks all the healthful and environmentally sensitive boxes, and aromatic tofu pho, with a dozen kinds of veggies and flat rice noodles.
Lotus root, anyone? A pleasure, and an education, for climate-conscious foodies.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798200962372
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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