An ode to rice that offer a vivid tour of the science, philosophy, and culture behind it.
Zhang, a botanist and professor at Savannah State University in Georgia, presents a debut book about rice and its importance throughout human history.
Rice is such a common food throughout the world, but few know its history as a staple crop. The journey begins in the Chinese village of Hemudu, which is home to one of the earliest rice farming villages, dating back to at least 3,300 B.C.E. As a cereal crop, rice began as a wild grass with surprising biological differences between short grain and long grain varieties. The legend of how rice noodles were created in Guilin, China, during the Qin dynasty in 214 B.C.E. works effortlessly alongside accounts of the author’s personal journeys around the world and current state of the crop as one of the “cultural threads” that connect Asia and Africa. Rich descriptions bring historical facts to life, as in an account of when Yuan Longping, a Chinese rice researcher, attempted to create a male-sterile line of rice in 1966 and finally found what he was looking for: He “pulled the plant out of the swamp carefully and wrapped it gingerly with a paper. Covered with mud and dripping with water, his assistants brought the plant back to the lab. They nurtured the mutant like a baby, hand-pollinating all of its sixty-five florets.” This discovery saved millions of lives in China during the 1970s and 1980s—and it’s just one intriguing tidbit in a tome that’s packed with information. The material is handled with passion, and its keen eye toward all aspects of the crop will engage readers. From a scientific explanation of the difficulties in developing self-pollinating cereal crop hybrids to an account of the author’s delight in tasting rice-based gumbo in Savannah, Georgia, for the first time, this is a love letter to an ancient grain that, to this day, feeds the world.
An ode to rice that offer a vivid tour of the science, philosophy, and culture behind it.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 9781977253705
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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