RaveThe Wall Street JournalOffers food tours to help people like me develop a deeper appreciation of the varieties of Chinese cuisine ... Dunlop brings the cuisines deliciously to life with her ample powers of description. This is a tool of the food writer’s trade, and she wields it expertly ... The text is erudite, too, dense and lively, enriched with history as well as fragments of archaic poetry and proverbs, the etymology of food terms, and playful examples of the cross-pollination of Chinese food and life ... Dunlop sets out to change those misguided views. The result is a joyously sensual, deeply researched and unabashedly chauvinistic read, a feast for anyone curious about how 1.4 billion people eat.
Emily Monosson
RaveThe Wall Street JournalUpdates the science and the current efforts to circumvent these diseases. Ms. Monosson’s writing is sober, well-organized and coherent, and the subject is fascinating. But what is unique about Blight is its timing.
Suzanne Simard
RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a vivid and inspiring new memoir ... Ms. Simard...shows her prowess as a communicator, something she teaches as well. Even an English major like myself can understand the biology described here ... a combination of personal anecdote and scientific article. For each of Ms. Simard’s discoveries, we get the hypothesis, the experiment and methods, a discussion of results, and a conclusion suggesting where it all might lead. But the author makes it easy by replacing the emotion-purged language of science with something more lyrical, enriching and subjective. There are beautiful paragraphs listing species and their niches ... And there are surprising (and surprisingly apt) analogies ... For Ms. Simard, personal experience leads to revelation, and scientific revelation leads to personal insight. No surprise, then, that she endows trees with human characteristics ... Her portrayals provide the lay reader with an anthropomorphic compass by which to better navigate the biology. But it’s a slippery slope. I chafe when genetic adaptation is called wisdom, or feedback loops are described as intelligence, when maybe it is more accurate to say feedback loops are a model for intelligence. I feel a little crabby complaining about it, but that’s the anthropomorphism conundrum ... In the end, I think the affixing of human traits on plants is justified because Finding the Mother Tree helps make sense of a forest of mysteries.
James Hamblin
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... a breezy social history with a health angle, an easy read by a charming, sassy author ... offers some very welcome debunking of cosmetic claims ... I can quibble about various omissions, like shaving (what does that do to the skin microbiome, I ask, hundreds of disposable razors later), and about Mr. Hamblin’s reliance on the well-trod conceit of experiential journalism, with his visits to predictably zany places like the Natural Products Expo and the Goop website. But the science writing is accessible and articulate—graceful even—and there are some wonderful surprises, like when Mr. Hamblin cooked up a homemade men’s grooming product with a hilarious name too obscene to print here and posted the stuff for sale online to illustrate how utterly unencumbered by regulatory agencies such products and their claims can be.
Merlin Sheldrake
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...[a] rich and colorful portrait of fungi ...Mr. Sheldrake manages the immense subject of mycology by taking a literary approach. He looks at fungi through a variety of themes and analogies, and in the process is able to disclose so much more about these enigmatic organisms ... But there’s more packed into this lively stew of scientific fact, poetic observation and philosophical musing. Interwoven throughout are glimpses of the author ... Entangled Life is a gorgeous book of literary nature writing in the tradition of Mr. Macfarlane and John Fowles, ripe with insight and erudition. It may appeal most to readers who have a little mycology under their belts, but the language is eloquent and the analogies plentiful enough to secure the pleasure of someone less scientifically literate. Frothy beach reading? Maybe not. But food for the soul, definitely.
Patricia Wiltshire
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... fascinating ... Painting a picture based on myriad details is what Ms. Wiltshire does, and she does it again in this lively profile of her work and personality ... In most chapters a bit of well-described Biology 101 leads to a thrilling true-crime story and how Ms. Wiltshire helped solve it in her own exacting way ... there is some redundancy here. Ms. Wiltshire is prone to describe how she solved a case from Fact A to Conclusion Z, and then tells the story over again from Z to A. Likewise, she tends to repeat phrases from one chapter to the next; I found myself wondering if I had lost my place or she just thought I needed reminding ... Crabby, brilliant and brittle, but also quite tender when it comes to the loss and pain of grieving families, Ms. Wiltshire seems to come straight out of a British detective series ... With a lead character like this, the science and crimes, while highly readable, are mainly stages and props for this engaging and enlightening one-woman show.
Ryan Jacobs
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal... a lively exposé ... That culture of silence may be why many of the crimes Mr. Jacobs describes aren’t solved—they just fizzle—and why he had to pad some of his reporting, especially on the early stages of the truffle’s supply chain, with tedious descriptions of offices or the act of a farmer retrieving a truffle from a pig’s mouth. But once he moves on to the truffle traders, his writing comes alive. While I was surprised he neglected to investigate Italy’s tourist-fleecing International Alba White Truffle Fair, he certainly delivers on the retail market’s rascally middlemen and -women, and the degree to which they compromise their integrity in what is ultimately a self-regulating industry ... Mr. Jacobs demonstrates his reporting strength in his detailed exploration of truffle cons and the detective work that has uncovered some of them ... if you’d like to be a more successful truffle consumer, this is the book for you. But even if truffles are beyond your pay grade, there is plenty of enjoyment to be had in the sheer devilment portrayed in this informative and appetizing book.
Deborah Blum
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIt sounds like the stuff of fiction, but according to Deborah Blum’s The Poison Squad, a detailed, highly readable history of food and drink regulation in the United States, adulterated foods proliferated in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th ... The Poison Squad is a granular look at the evolution of a particular set of regulations in the history of United States ... It’s helpful to remember that what seems obviously criminal today—like adding formaldehyde to milk—was disputed in the past. It’s also helpful to remember that the techniques used to push back against regulation 80 years ago are pretty much the same as today: the suppression of science and the unfortunate influence of lobbyists and money on politicians.
Andrew Friedman
RaveWall Street Journal\"Andrew Friedman, a master of the chef-cookbook genre and expert in the family tree of American restaurant chefs, explains it all in his rambunctious history Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession ... It’s not easy to describe the effects of many things that were all happening at about the same time, but Mr. Friedman does an admirable job. The reader gets a strong sense of the main forces behind the food revolution of the 1970s and ’80s, though not very much about the food itself. Food porn addicts hot for greasy, carbony chewiness should look elsewhere. That said, I loved reading Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll.
Gary Taubes
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Taubes’s argument is so persuasive that, after reading The Case Against Sugar, this functioning chocoholic cut out the Snacking Bark and stopped eating cakes and white bread ... Methodically, relentlessly, Mr. Taubes argues that 'bad science' over the course of many years primarily blamed obesity, diabetes and other 'Western diseases' on overeating or lack of exercise or both ... Mr. Taubes convinced me that these food companies deliberately set out to manipulate research on American health to their favor and to the detriment of the American public ... The Case Against Sugar should be a powerful weapon against future misinformation.
Hope Jahren
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalRambling tales of eccentric colleagues and late-night discoveries are interspersed with lyrical, mostly illuminating, but sometimes treacly essays on plants that are metaphorically tied to a point in the author’s life ... [Lab Girl offers a lively glimpse into a scientifically inclined mind. Ms. Jahren’s writing style, honed on her prolific Twitter feed and feisty, outspoken blog, is sentimental at times but also raucous (there’s lots of swearing) and surprisingly candid (she suffers from mania). The book is a portrait, not a story; it doesn’t have a driving narrative, and the best moments describe not feelings but process.
Bee Wilson
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMs. Wilson’s book isn’t perfect. Occasionally her arguments tread familiar turf...Still, First Bite should be read by every young parent, and is a good resource for adults with eating disorders and those with more prosaic problems like waistline drift. There are some very useful ideas within these pages, and none of the usual pseudoscientific bunk that plagues books about diet. Carefully crafted, astutely served, delicious and nourishing: First Bite is a real treat.
