A passionate call for “responsible meat-eating” and what that means, as well as an explanation of the small steps required...
A loosely organized, lively and challenging collection of observations, ideas, philosophical meanderings and ethical concerns related to the meat we put on our plates.
Along with former High Times editor Edison (Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers—An American Tale of Sex and Wonder, 2011, etc.), Martins takes a scattershot approach to the discussion, dividing the book into 50 short chapters that cut a wide swath, covering everything from slow food principles to the inhumane treatment of animals on factory farms to how to build a slaughterhouse and the importance of biodiversity and rare heritage breeds. Martins uses the word têtoir for cultures and communities that hand down food traditions, creating distinctive flavors much in the way terroir gives wine its distinct characteristics. Martins, who founded Slow Food USA, now runs Heritage Foods USA, a purveyor of meats from farmers who humanely raise rare or heritage breeds without antibiotics or hormones. His free-ranging thought process, at times distracting, always comes back to slow food basics: “…sourcing responsibly, recognizing the farmer’s work and understanding exactly what we are eating and where it comes from.” For example, a dirt-scratching Narragansett turkey that freely roamed the barnyard will have a different taste than one raised in a windowless barn under bright lights, its beak and toenails removed, unable to stand due to its inordinately large breasts. Consumers may abhor such treatment, but are they ready to pay $140 for “a robust, healthy animal that lived a great life?” Martins recognizes that the economic realities of big agriculture vs. independent farmers, distributors and purveyors are the biggest obstacles to his manifesto, but he remains optimistic that consumer demand may eventually bring changes to the supply chain. It begins with getting to know the farmers, butchers and green grocers who bring food to our tables; it’s about “provenance.”
A passionate call for “responsible meat-eating” and what that means, as well as an explanation of the small steps required for accomplishing it.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-25624-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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