If the thought of a future of a brewed burger isn’t appalling then this will be just your cup of meat.
An intriguing argument from an animal rights perspective for developing an economy of cultured, lab-born meat.
Shapiro, a vice president at the Humane Society, observes at the outset that the seemingly science-fiction–y thing he calls “clean meat” is a reality. The first “cultured hamburger” was produced in 2013, and though it cost about $330,000 back then, like every other technological innovation, its price has fallen—costs now are in the vicinity of $11 per burger. The same is true of animal foods and products of other kinds, from dairy to poultry to leather. The author invites readers to consider that within a decade or two, it may be possible to eat meat that has not involved the suffering of a living animal and to wear shoes made of leather that has not come from a slaughterhouse. Touring several experimental facilities and speaking with industry experts, Shapiro serves up portraits of a rapidly developing technology. One now-controversial product, foie gras, makes a good inaugural candidate for the industrial approach, since, as one spokesperson says, “the cell lines and media conditions would be relevant to similar products we want to make such as other duck meats, chicken liver, and other poultry products.” Naturally, there will be consumers who balk at the thought of laboratory-produced food, to which Shapiro responds that much of our food is already genetically modified. Meat may very well one day be seen as a kind of garnish rather than the centerpiece of a meal that is otherwise plant-governed. The least successful portion of the narrative, because it’s not entirely argued through, concerns the ethics of a hypothetical situation that is now verging into actuality: “would these animals never existing in the first place be better than us bringing them into the world, giving them a life, and killing them rapidly?”
If the thought of a future of a brewed burger isn’t appalling then this will be just your cup of meat.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8908-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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