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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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