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. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Categories: HEALTH & FITNESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS
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BOOK REVIEW
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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