A sure pick for Indian food enthusiasts seeking a new approach to well-being.
Arundale’s Indian cookbook incorporates ayurvedic wisdom and recipes for systemic balance and overall health.
The author, a native of India, immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. Once settled in America, she worked hard to master the art of Indian cooking. The author of multiple Indian cookbooks, Arundale has constructed this contribution upon the premise of ayurveda, a “traditional and natural system of medicine used to improve well-being.” The author discusses ayurvedic wisdom, presents recipes, and offers culinary remedies for specific ailments. Ayurvedic practices—based upon the idea that people are born with different internal energies (doshas) that are often unbalanced in our bodies—can include specific diets, daily routines, and seasonal approaches to achieve balance and health. Each internal energy, in turn, can interact with spices and foods to heal and balance the body. The book presents Indian recipes that promote health with subsections dedicated to spice blends, oils and dairy, soups, khichadis (rice/lentil dishes), legumes/dal, grains, breads, side vegetables, and chutneys and salads. The text includes healing recipes for specific ailments, such as apricot juice with nutmeg for constipation, fresh mango juice for building bodily tissues, and spinach, beet, and celery juice for uterine disorders and arthritis. This cookbook emphasizes ancient cultural wisdom and will enable cooks to produce authentic Indian dishes that cater to individual and family health needs. Unlike many other Indian cookbooks, this work features a primer on preparing a variety of spice mixtures and details some unique bread offerings, such as corn roti with cilantro and spicy onion wheat bread with fresh marjoram. The table of contents is clear for cooks seeking specific creations, and the recipes are user-friendly and easy to follow. Although the book does not offer an empirically grounded argument for ayurveda or feature options for those who have autoimmune disorders or cannot tolerate gluten and dairy, this work beautifully incorporates a healthy perspective with delicious, authentic Indian cuisine.
A sure pick for Indian food enthusiasts seeking a new approach to well-being.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781663250964
Page Count: 322
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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