A compelling primer on the benefits of an herbivorous diet for health and a stable planetary ecosystem.
Spitz's guide promotes a vegan lifestyle for both personal well-being and environmental sustainability.
The author, a septuagenarian environmental and animal rights activist, channels his passion for good health and a better world into this comprehensive study of the negative impacts of animal-based food sources. Split into seven sections and written from a variety of anthropological perspectives, the book outlines the origins of human consumption patterns and their evolution and adaptation across centuries (a section on the domestication of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and animals is particularly fascinating). Spitz ambitiously bolsters his viewpoint with history-supported hypotheses on how civilizations prospered through the popularity of agriculture, the exchange of fibrous plants and germination efforts across Old and New World cultures, and the ill effects of the human exploitation of animals as an increasingly popular food source, replacing the starchy vegetable diet enjoyed prior to the mid-19th century. His appeal for change stems directly from the numerous ways animal agriculture has become detrimental to both human vitality and the environment; the author points to studies concluding that human nutritional needs can be efficiently met with plant-based vegan nourishment “using a fraction of the land, water and energy resources it takes to provide an animal-based diet.” Spitz’s argument against the “global appetite for meat, dairy and eggs” is compelling as he discusses how livestock processing and production have had devastating environmental impacts on greenhouse gasses and runaway climate change across the globe. A final section details what the author considers “the optimal human diet.” Spitz references a convincing combination of data analysis, expansive anthropological research, and nutritional science studies that might prove too academically dense for lay readers seeking a more simplistic summary. Still, his approach remains applicably inclusive as he places responsibility directly on the reader to initiate dietary modifications. Having reached his 70s, the author is grateful for his thriving lifestyle; noting that the men in his family tend to die young, Spitz attributes his longevity to a healthful vegan mindset.
A compelling primer on the benefits of an herbivorous diet for health and a stable planetary ecosystem.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781662932885
Page Count: 510
Publisher: 6th Sense Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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