Carpenter’s entertaining narrative dissects caffeine’s circuitous route into consumer culture and its tenacious hold on the...
Having opined on caffeine for various publications, including the New York Times and Wired, Carpenter delivers a compelling compendium of facts and figures on this “largely unregulated drug.”
The author readily admits his addiction to the stimulant. While his favorite caffeine delivery system is coffee, others prefer sweet sodas, high-octane energy drinks, or caffeine-laced gum, pills or gels. “What few of us are willing to admit,” he writes, “is that the essence of our longing is this bitter white powder.” Carpenter blends intriguing historical episodes with interviews, accounts of treks to caffeine-related locations and a multitude of test results. The author’s barrage of facts and statistics is initially intriguing but eventually leaves readers buried within the aggregation of data. More gripping are Carpenter’s accounts of the long-running corporate marketing tactics designed to underplay caffeine’s ability to cause panic attacks, insomnia or anxiety—not to mention addiction. The author details the military’s ongoing search for products designed to keep soldiers “amped up” with caffeinated foods—e.g., a caffeinated apple pie in a package resembling a toothpaste tube. Carpenter uncovers other bizarre applications as well, such as caffeine-infused pantyhose that are marketed with the promise of weight loss. The author also recounts his visits to coffee farms in Guatemala, a coffee roasting plant in Vermont and the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health. Refused access to the world’s largest synthetic caffeine factory in China, Carpenter notes that the industry is far from transparent; inspections are rare, and conditions are not always sanitary. “Just three Chinese factories exported seven million pounds of synthetic caffeine to the United States in 2011,” writes the author, “nearly half of our total imports.”
Carpenter’s entertaining narrative dissects caffeine’s circuitous route into consumer culture and its tenacious hold on the human mind and body.Pub Date: March 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59463-138-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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