Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.
A new exposé of the American meat industry.
Since Upton Sinclair’s 1906 bestseller, The Jungle, denunciations of the meat industry appear regularly, and they remain fully justified. A simple description of what happens when an animal enters a slaughterhouse will horrify most readers, and equally time-honored are journalists’ depictions of low-wage slaughterhouse work, which is gruesome, dangerous, and unhealthy. Sorvino, who runs the coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes, does not ignore these easy marks, but she aims higher, targeting multinational corporations, billionaires, global trade, climate change, soil destruction, and pollution. “Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations,” she writes, “but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future.” American farmers and meat processors benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, but their profits are a result of their cruel, assembly-line efficiency in factory farms or titanic feedlots, where the animals consume hyperdense feed, chemicals, and antibiotics to boost their weight before slaughter. Research reveals strong evidence that processed food, including bacon, ham, hot dogs, and salami, can cause cancer. Readers will gnash their teeth at Sorvino’s vivid accounts of rapacious billionaires and the half-dozen mega-corporations that dominate the industry, pollute waterways, and exhaust farmland under the very gentle hand of government regulators. In the final section, the author explores a few solutions, but she is skeptical that alternative protein will ever upend traditional industrial systems. She describes a dozen entrepreneurs and their protein alternatives, but “meat alternatives accounted for 0.2 percent of 2020 grocery meat sales.” Money is rarely their main problem because this is a trendy field for venture capitalists (even the industry giants are researching this area), but investors nearly always value profit over saving the environment, and many of their products are far from organic, requiring industrial farmed inputs, chemicals, and pesticides.
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-04-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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