A compelling agricultural story skillfully told; environmentalists will eat it up.
An organic farmer and entrepreneur in Montana shares his experiences and ideas for changing the way America produces its food.
The organic spokesman’s story is co-authored by Carlisle (Lecturer/School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences/Stanford Univ.), whose previous book, Lentil Underground (2015), also focused on an entrepreneurial Montana-based organic farmer. After her explanatory prologue, Carlisle remains hidden so that the experiences and the opinions represent Quinn’s voice. The book is partly memoir: Readers learn about Quinn’s upbringing on a Montana farm, his various ventures into organic farming, his work to improve soil quality, and his launching of a wind farm and biofuel project. However, the text serves mainly as an argument about the necessity of valuing quality in food and how it can help heal people instead of making them sick, alleviate poverty by rebuilding rural communities, and reduce damage to the environment. Central to the story is an ancient grain from Mesopotamia that Quinn experimented with and the building of Kamut International, a large wheat corporation operating internationally. The picture that emerges is that of an experienced farmer and a resourceful, community-minded businessman. Quinn’s tale is also a diatribe against America’s widespread agricultural-industrial complex. He rails against “Americans’ fiercely held attachment to cheap consumer goods, particularly cheap food. Transformed from producers into consumers at the same time as their economic status diminished, the American middle class insisted on lower and lower prices, spurred on by corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s.” That’s the bad news. Quinn does provide evidence of progress, as more and more people, especially millennials, are becoming informed consumers, interested in where their food comes from and how it is produced, and an increasing number are becoming farmers, producing organically and selling locally. The few black-and-white photographs scattered throughout add little to the text, which stands alone quite well.
A compelling agricultural story skillfully told; environmentalists will eat it up.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61091-995-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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