Lotus root, anyone? A pleasure, and an education, for climate-conscious foodies.
Eating to fix the planet.
Working with climate journalist Kostigen, founder of the Climate Survivalist column for USA Today and author of The Green Book and Hacking Planet Earth, Downey Jr. serves up food that’s not just hip (as it surely is) but can also be useful in containing or even reversing climate change. Cool food, write the authors, is “a holistic approach to making the world a whole lot better by simply making more informed decisions about something that each and every one of us does anyway—eat.” Those informed decisions require doing a little homework—for example, chasing down sources of locally grown organic food that is appropriate to its season (no Chilean strawberries in January) and finding restaurants that are committed to the humane treatment of animals and to pesticide-free plants. Among other things, the authors counsel that seeking out “ancient grains” such as amaranth is one step to getting away from environmentally damaging mass-produced products. Perhaps curiously, they name rice among the baddies while writing that “wheat is the best cool food to eat,” but the environmental reasoning seems basically sound, even if readers with celiac disease won’t benefit much from the advice. Some of their recommendations are unremarkable—Francis Moore Lappé counseled lowering if not cutting out meat consumption half a century ago—but much is broadly practical. It’s good to know, for instance, that lentils not only pack a powerful protein punch but also have “a puny carbon footprint.” Scattered liberally throughout the vibrant graphics-heavy book are various delightful recipes, including lentil and tomato dahl with whole-meal roti bread, which ticks all the healthful and environmentally sensitive boxes, and aromatic tofu pho, with a dozen kinds of veggies and flat rice noodles.
Lotus root, anyone? A pleasure, and an education, for climate-conscious foodies.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798200962372
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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