A treat for literate, adventure-loving foodies, best accompanied by a bespoke chocolate bar.
A spirited quest for the perfect cacao bean.
Food journalist Jacobsen opens his comprehensive account in Oaxaca, Mexico, not far from a source of cacao and its resulting chocolate, so prized by the Aztecs that they expanded their empire far from its heartland to gain control of the Pacific coastal region where it grew. All cacao is, he writes, “ridiculously rich,” with a fat content of at least 55 percent, but some of the world’s most prized cacao, found in remote tropical forests from Mexico south to its homeland in the Bolivian jungle east of the Andes, is far richer still. These hard-to-find “wild cacao” plants fuel the gourmet chocolatiers of the world, such as the Swiss producer Felchlin, supplied by a German agronomist in Bolivia who built and lost a fortune in the chocolate trade but, for all his travails, can’t stop searching for the cacao grail. Jacobsen goes far afield himself, meeting some wonderfully weird characters and tracing their finds to chocolate makers in the U.S. and Europe. A skilled food historian with a sharp eye for the economics of the delicious, he also peppers his prose with interesting tidbits, including the boom-and-bust ways of lumpen chocolatiers like Hershey, which once commandeered the entire cacao output of Belize but then, when market conditions changed, left growers holding the proverbial bag. Of particular interest to budding entrepreneurs is the fact that several of Jacobsen’s subjects are young women who have carved a place for themselves as brokers for the organically grown, sustainable cacao whose growers are paid a premium. There’s plenty of adventure left in the game, Jacobsen writes: “In all likelihood, the Amazon and other remote corners of Latin America harbor other unique families of cacao waiting for their big moment. The search continues.”
A treat for literate, adventure-loving foodies, best accompanied by a bespoke chocolate bar.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781639733576
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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