A tasty, instructive, but somewhat underdone guide to successfully eating your fruit and vegetables.
McInnes provides an informative primer on vegetables and fruits.
In her preface, the author writes that she’s spent 25 years gathering “tidbits of useful information from a variety of sources on how to make the most of my fruits and vegetables.” The result is a detailed guide to buying, caching, and preparing produce. McInnes provides the reader with an overview of general topics, including peak seasons, tips on selecting produce, necessary supplies for working with produce, storage principles, cooking methods for vegetables, and freezing methods for fruits. The author goes on to discuss every vegetable and fruit typically found in a North American grocery store, with a section on each containing information about the item’s availability, warning signs to watch out for, storage options, preparation ideas, and applicable cooking or freezing methods. McInnes’ enthusiasm for produce shines throughout, and her facts and tips are generally engaging and helpful, such as her advice to store scallions standing up and to avoid keeping onions with potatoes. The text lacks professional polish at times, containing repeated images, the occasional typographical error, an overabundance of semicolons, and questions that go unanswered. The author writes, “Eating a mango before bedtime will help lull you into a deep, quality night’s sleep,” an intriguing fact that will surely prompt readers to ask, “Why?” But the book does not provide an answer. In addition, the author’s decision to discuss cooking suggestions for vegetables but to only provide freezing instructions for fruits (with the exception of oranges, which, she notes, can be juiced) ignores the fact that many fruits can be juiced, stewed, and/or baked. Nevertheless, this extremely practical guide would make an excellent side dish for a more theoretical book about plant-based eating, such as Alicia Kennedy’s No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating(2023).
A tasty, instructive, but somewhat underdone guide to successfully eating your fruit and vegetables.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 979-8988447702
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Spark Health 360
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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