A nimble story about how one man’s revolutionary ideas changed the way we eat.
Former country music singer/songwriter and newly minted geography doctorate student Carlisle unearths the secret history of a rogue posse of organic farmers operating deep in rural Montana.
Readers might be understandably reluctant to take in more than 300 pages of in-depth reportage about the emergence of legumes as a practical food product, but take a chance on this dive in to an eccentric niche of the American farm industry—it has a strange attraction, especially for foodies, business innovators and entrepreneurs. The book tells the story of Dave Oien, a farming legacy who returned home in 1976 with inspirations from the teachings of Black Elk and plans to bring solar energy to his family farm. By the mid-1980s, Oien was obsessed with the radical notion of growing organic lentils instead of the traditional crops favored by his fellow farmers. Long before they became the darling of Whole Foods chefs, Oien figured out that lentils “fix” their own nitrogen, converting it to ammonia, which is a critical element in allowing plants to grow—all without the poisonous chemicals used in growing other crops. Joining together with five other forward-thinking farmers, Oien formed Timeless Natural Food and eventually figured out a way to grow edible lentils and other organic products. The remainder of the book covers Oien’s transformation from a simple organic farmer to a kind of pied piper for the organic foods movement, inspiring farm improvement clubs, riding the wave of the new American appetite for inspiring new foodstuffs, and eventually dragging chefs, politicos, scientists and other farmers around to his way of thinking. "This lentil harvest is no fairytale success, but a complicated saga of adaptation, learning, and even some tragedy,” writes Carlisle. “The story of Timeless seeds is not a heroic one, but then again these fragile plains are not a place that needs heroes.”
A nimble story about how one man’s revolutionary ideas changed the way we eat.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-920-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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