An appealingly complex narrative of a successful quest, with recipes for the home baker.
Playwright and screenwriter Yafa (Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber, 2004) debunks the claim by “the anti-gluten medical contingent” that wheat is unhealthy because it contains gluten, a protein that supposedly contributes to “obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and more.”
The author suggests that store-bought bread and cereals have been stripped of their nutritional value in order to increase profitability—e.g., by replacing more labor-intensive stone grinding by roller mills and speeding the time of fermentation during baking. Furthermore, bread makers often deliberately remove fiber and wheat germ in order to create easily digestible, popular products such as hamburger buns. This process strips them of their nutritional value, leaving them heavy on starch. “Nobody wants to hear that humans, not nature's gluten all on its own, might be the source of the problem with wheat,” writes the author. Moreover, he points out, since it is the main source of nourishment for much of the world's population, removing wheat from the picture could cause famine. The author's personal confrontation with the issue came when his wife returned from a weekend at a health spa, convinced that gluten was the cause of her muscular distress. An avid home baker as well an investigative journalist, Yafa was soon hot on the trail of the booming new industry of gluten-free products, many of which have less nutritional value than traditional versions. “Real nourishing and delicious bread did not seem to be getting a fair hearing,” he writes, and he delivers on his claim to “tell a more balanced, less sensational story about wheat.” He reports on his months of travel meeting with experts—microbiologists, organic farmers, artisan bakers, specialty chefs, and more—in order to deepen his understanding of the art and science of bread making and its history.
An appealingly complex narrative of a successful quest, with recipes for the home baker.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-249-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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