A tasty sojourn through the landscape of America’s endangered foods, served with a scoop of energy and a dash of hope.
A food historian argues that preserving the richness of what we eat is part of recognizing our cultural legacy.
Good food is one of the great pleasures of life, notes Lohman, and a tragedy of modern times is that the development of agribusiness corporations threatens to reduce the variety on our plates. In her 2016 book, Eight Flavors, the author explored America’s culinary history; here, she comes at the subject from another angle, traveling around the country to investigate traditional foods that are returning from the edge of extinction. As her guide, she uses an online catalog called the Ark of Taste, produced by an organization called Slow Food International, which is dedicated to preserving food diversity. She finds plenty of optimistic stories, such as the orchardists keeping apple types alive and the breeders of longhorn cattle, which have gone out of fashion with beef producers. Many of the foods that interest Lohman have roots in Indigenous cultures, and the story of the displacement of traditional Hawaiian culture to grow sugar cane has a tragic aspect. The author is willing to go deep into the rituals of traditional food preparation; for example, she happily gutted salmon caught by Native American methods on the Pacific coast and helped butcher a Navajo-Churro lamb. Along the way, she looks at the legacy of wild rice, the origin of peanut farming, and the resurgence of the Buckeye chicken. At the end of each chapter, Lohman includes recipes of the foods featured, and they all sound delicious. The result is a package that is enjoyable, entertaining, and meaningful. The author encourages readers to begin their own journey of culinary discovery: “The secret of the Ark is that you don’t have to travel very far at all….There’s probably a rare food practically in your backyard.”
A tasty sojourn through the landscape of America’s endangered foods, served with a scoop of energy and a dash of hope.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781324004660
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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