An involving, multivoiced look into the lives of disabled diet specialists.
Baxter and Harris discuss the challenges disabled people face working in the dietetics field.
In their debut collaboration, the authors tell stories highlighting the difficulties disabled people encounter working as dietetics practitioners in settings like hospitals, universities, day care centers, prisons, government agencies, and private companies. Fifteen of the book’s chapters are autobiographical accounts from both Baxter and Harris, along with a variety of contributors telling their own stories. According to Harris, up to a quarter of the United States population has some kind of disability (“If you or a member of your family do not already have a disability, you and/or a family member will more than likely experience disability at some point in the future”), and yet nothing approaching this percentage is represented in the dietetics field, where disabled professionals represent only a tiny portion of the workforce. The narratives the authors assemble here illustrate both the shortcomings of many institutions in accommodating the needs of disabled people and also the successes “disability culture” has achieved in challenging negative stereotypes and focusing on “empowerment, community, and the human experience by emphasizing the strengths, creativity, and contributions of disabled people.” Harris recounts her journey to becoming a gastrointestinal dietician and shares the insights she gleaned along the way about the public dimension of her condition: “If I (or anyone else) would benefit from support, or a mobility aid, or whatever, I should get it if possible,” she writes. “No one benefits from my suffering or your suffering.” Harris and Baxter’s inclusion of a variety of experiences in addition to their own is effective; through the different voices and viewpoints expressed here, disabled readers may find more of their own experiences reflected in these pages, and nondisabled readers will receive insights into a world they’ve likely never considered. The result is both eye-opening and very useful on practical levels.
An involving, multivoiced look into the lives of disabled diet specialists.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798991299312
Page Count: 275
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
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