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YUM

PLANT-BASED RECIPES FOR A GLUTEN-FREE DIET

A thorough, informative cookbook for healthy meals; ideal for those with food restrictions.

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Nicassio’s collection of more than 180 recipes that are plant-based and gluten-free offers help to those who suffer from dietary restrictions.

After suffering from negative reactions from some foods, Nicassio, a registered psychologist, sought out alternative methods of healing and ways to use food as medicine. She “became a Certified Integrative Energy Healing Practitioner, a Certified Gourmet Raw Food Chef and Instructor and a Certified Advanced Raw Food Nutrition Educator.” Her YUM philosophy is inclusive—even die-hard junk-food addicts or meat lovers can enjoy her recipes alongside those who need or choose to avoid certain foods. Nicassio emphasizes easing into the world of healthier eating, gradually incorporating more nutritious ingredients into the pantry and trying just a few recipes at a time. She lists “Funky Foods,” many of which are key ingredients in her recipes. Golden berries, lovage, buckwheat groats, kelp noodles, camelina oil, coconut aminos, and chicory root inulin powder may not be familiar to those without access to a well-stocked health food store. But Nicassio clearly and simply explains the nutritional importance of these ingredients. She also lists helpful kitchen tools, but since some items, like high-speed blenders, can be expensive, she suggests experimenting with a regular blender first. The recipes include nearly all food types—beverages, appetizers, salads, snacks, main dishes, etc. Some recipes aren’t as simple as billed: more than 70 require another recipe or two from the book (her Stuffed Bell Peppers recipe requires four), so interested readers will benefit by fully stocking their kitchens before proceeding. Environmentally conscious cooks will appreciate Nicassio’s section on creative, easy ways to reduce waste in the kitchen. Although probably best suited to those already familiar with plant-based, gluten-free eating, the author’s charm might convince many others to give it a go.

A thorough, informative cookbook for healthy meals; ideal for those with food restrictions.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-99-391560-4

Page Count: 368

Publisher: D&D Publishing and Distribution

Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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