Grescoe writes with color, energy, and humor, and the result is a fascinating book that leaves you hungry for more.
A surprising, flavorsome tour of ancient cuisines demonstrating how the way forward involves looking back.
This is not just another slick volume about cooking exotic food. Montreal-based Grescoe, author of a number of award-winning books, including Straphanger and Bottomfeeder, loves food and is an adventurous diner, but he also has serious points to make. He is deeply concerned with the shrinking biodiversity of food production and the lack of real nutrition in processed foods. The answer, he believes, is to look at what earlier civilizations ate. In the course of his research, he visited ancient sites and met with farmers and Indigenous peoples who are resurrecting preindustrial methods of agriculture. He sampled axayacatl, an important insect in the Aztec diet. In Greece, he indulged in oil from very old olive trees, which leads to a discussion of the role that olives played in the spread of civilization. He tasted a salty fish sauce called garum, which has been around for centuries. On Vancouver Island, Grescoe tried the native camas, “a tuber that was widely consumed on the Northwest Coast before the Europeans came.” Along the way, the author learned that pigs were brought to the Americas by the conquistadors and that the first cheeses were made more than 7,000 years ago. Grescoe has tried to re-create some of the dishes he discovered in his own kitchen, with a surprising degree of success. His final effort involved making bread using ingredients and methods gleaned from the study of a Neolithic site in Turkey. Grescoe advises readers to look beyond the supermarket shelves, think before they buy, and take some culinary chances. “For those who champion the Earth’s dwindling nutritional diversity,” he concludes, “the message is as simple as it is urgent: to save it, you’ve got to eat it.”
Grescoe writes with color, energy, and humor, and the result is a fascinating book that leaves you hungry for more.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781771647632
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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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