The author tells a sad, horrifying story, a severe indictment of both corporate greed and consumer complacency.
A scathing report on the consequences of factory farming.
In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the exploitation of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry and the shockingly filthy conditions in which meat was processed. Mother Jones contributing editor Genoways (Walt Whitman and the Civil War, 2009, etc.), winner of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, shows that little has changed in more than 100 years. The workers he focuses on are mostly Hispanic; the companies are those that breed, slaughter and process pigs. He looks particularly at Hormel, which invented, aggressively marketed and continues to manufacture Spam, the canned product that meets consumer demand for meat that is easy to prepare and, most important, cheap. It is the real cost of cheap meat that drives Genoways’ investigation: the cost in consumer health, worker safety, animal abuse, environmental contamination and community strife. Hormel’s meat processing, which the author describes in nauseating detail, depends on a workforce comprised mostly of undocumented immigrants: “thankful for their paychecks, willing to endure harsh working conditions, unlikely to unionize.” Those conditions worsened for workers eviscerating hog heads when Hormel increased line speed to more than 1,300 heads per hour. The heads piled up against a Plexiglass shield, cracking it and spattering pigs’ brains over the workers and into the air. In the next months, “an epidemic of neuropathy” spread among workers, leading, for many, to “permanent, irreversible damage.” Hormel and its many subsidiaries fought unionization; fought restrictions on the size, location and inspection of their facilities; and fought whistle-blowers who videotaped sows being mercilessly beaten. The company made an unexpected shift, however, allying itself with liberal protestors when communities mounted anti-immigration campaigns that would have decimated its cheap labor. The Food and Drug Administration was a direct consequence of The Jungle, but Genoways has found “systemic failure” in meat inspection that results in “an illusion of safety.”
The author tells a sad, horrifying story, a severe indictment of both corporate greed and consumer complacency.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062288752
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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