The author tells a sad, horrifying story, a severe indictment of both corporate greed and consumer complacency.
A scathing report on the consequences of factory farming.
In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the exploitation of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry and the shockingly filthy conditions in which meat was processed. Mother Jones contributing editor Genoways (Walt Whitman and the Civil War, 2009, etc.), winner of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, shows that little has changed in more than 100 years. The workers he focuses on are mostly Hispanic; the companies are those that breed, slaughter and process pigs. He looks particularly at Hormel, which invented, aggressively marketed and continues to manufacture Spam, the canned product that meets consumer demand for meat that is easy to prepare and, most important, cheap. It is the real cost of cheap meat that drives Genoways’ investigation: the cost in consumer health, worker safety, animal abuse, environmental contamination and community strife. Hormel’s meat processing, which the author describes in nauseating detail, depends on a workforce comprised mostly of undocumented immigrants: “thankful for their paychecks, willing to endure harsh working conditions, unlikely to unionize.” Those conditions worsened for workers eviscerating hog heads when Hormel increased line speed to more than 1,300 heads per hour. The heads piled up against a Plexiglass shield, cracking it and spattering pigs’ brains over the workers and into the air. In the next months, “an epidemic of neuropathy” spread among workers, leading, for many, to “permanent, irreversible damage.” Hormel and its many subsidiaries fought unionization; fought restrictions on the size, location and inspection of their facilities; and fought whistle-blowers who videotaped sows being mercilessly beaten. The company made an unexpected shift, however, allying itself with liberal protestors when communities mounted anti-immigration campaigns that would have decimated its cheap labor. The Food and Drug Administration was a direct consequence of The Jungle, but Genoways has found “systemic failure” in meat inspection that results in “an illusion of safety.”
The author tells a sad, horrifying story, a severe indictment of both corporate greed and consumer complacency.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062288752
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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