Grescoe writes with color, energy, and humor, and the result is a fascinating book that leaves you hungry for more.
A surprising, flavorsome tour of ancient cuisines demonstrating how the way forward involves looking back.
This is not just another slick volume about cooking exotic food. Montreal-based Grescoe, author of a number of award-winning books, including Straphanger and Bottomfeeder, loves food and is an adventurous diner, but he also has serious points to make. He is deeply concerned with the shrinking biodiversity of food production and the lack of real nutrition in processed foods. The answer, he believes, is to look at what earlier civilizations ate. In the course of his research, he visited ancient sites and met with farmers and Indigenous peoples who are resurrecting preindustrial methods of agriculture. He sampled axayacatl, an important insect in the Aztec diet. In Greece, he indulged in oil from very old olive trees, which leads to a discussion of the role that olives played in the spread of civilization. He tasted a salty fish sauce called garum, which has been around for centuries. On Vancouver Island, Grescoe tried the native camas, “a tuber that was widely consumed on the Northwest Coast before the Europeans came.” Along the way, the author learned that pigs were brought to the Americas by the conquistadors and that the first cheeses were made more than 7,000 years ago. Grescoe has tried to re-create some of the dishes he discovered in his own kitchen, with a surprising degree of success. His final effort involved making bread using ingredients and methods gleaned from the study of a Neolithic site in Turkey. Grescoe advises readers to look beyond the supermarket shelves, think before they buy, and take some culinary chances. “For those who champion the Earth’s dwindling nutritional diversity,” he concludes, “the message is as simple as it is urgent: to save it, you’ve got to eat it.”
Grescoe writes with color, energy, and humor, and the result is a fascinating book that leaves you hungry for more.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781771647632
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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