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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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