Useful science for the layperson.
A debut self-help guide surveys the ways in which diet and metabolism may affect patients with chronic infection.
This manual arose from Young’s five years of research into chronic Lyme disease and Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome. Her own Lyme disease was only diagnosed after she’d endured years of extensive testing at the hands of many doctors. Noting that hypothyroidism is common in Lyme patients, she believes that metabolism rather than antibiotics is the key to keeping chronic infection at bay. Lyme disease slows the metabolism and leads to chronic stress, which in turn weakens the immune system, she explains. The book tackles the science behind chronic infection in a “for dummies” format that covers the basics without being opaque or condescending. Along with solid general advice—limit caffeine, get good sleep, and consume more calories to make up for the nutrients that infections leach—Young compares fad diets and picks out their commonalities in one of the most useful chapters. “If diet fads were countries they would all be at war. Diet is just one of those things on which we will never all agree,” she wryly observes. She tried out various options including juice fasting and a paleo diet before deciding the low-carbohydrate lifestyle was actually making her symptoms worse. Indeed, she contends that extreme restriction diets can easily backfire and make patients sicker. Nowadays, the author’s magic bullet is five tablespoons per day of Manuka honey, which increases her energy and may have antimicrobial properties. Although Young chronicles her own health decisions here, she emphasizes that fellow chronic infection patients should be flexible and experiment with their diets until they find out what works for them. Headings in bold, bullet-pointed lists and the “In Summary” or “Chapter Takeaways” sections ending many chapters are reader-friendly strategies that make the book’s information easily digestible. A helpful final “Remedies” section functions as a glossary as well as a list of suggested supplements, etc. to try. But the informal style—“Lyme disease is friggin’ complex,” and “I think we can all agree that drugs are frakkin awesome!”—grates.
Useful science for the layperson.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9949167-1-6
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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