RaveSlateIt is this voice—fierce, billowing with energy, precise—that carries Wild ... In it, there is room for emotional breakdowns on the PCT; longings for Snapple lemonade that one imagines rival the ones she previously reserved for drugs; descriptions of the beauty, misery, and danger—not to mention moose and rattlesnakes—she encountered on her 100-day walk. By turns both devastating and glorious, Strayed uses it to narrate her progress and setbacks on the trail and within herself ... By laying bare a great unspoken truth of adulthood—that many things in life don’t turn out the way you want them to, and that you can and must live through them anyway—Wild feels real in ways that many books about \'finding oneself,\' including Eat, Pray, Love and all its imitators, do not ... Strayed waited close to 20 years to publish her story, and it shows ... she never writes from a place of desperation in the kind of semi-edited purge state that has marred so many true stories in recent years. Such fine control over so many unfathomable, enormous experiences was no doubt hard-won, and much of it clearly came long after Strayed’s days on the PCT were over.
Deborah Blum
PositiveBookforumThe devil has got hold of the food supply in this country.\' This was the conclusion of Nebraska Senator Algernon Paddock, chairman of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, in 1891. That year, he sponsored a bill that would become just one more failed legislative attempt to require food producers to label their products truthfully. Among the transgressions he was trying to stop were common practices like whitening milk with chalk, \'embalming\' corned beef with formaldehyde, lacing fake whiskey with soap, and creating ground \'pepper\' made of \'common floor sweepings.\' It was not until 1906, after nearly two decades of testing, research, and political combat, that the country’s first Pure Food and Drug Act was signed into law, by President Theodore Roosevelt. As Deborah Blum writes in The Poison Squad if not for the perseverance of Harvey Wiley, a government chemist who’d grown up on an Indiana farm that served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, it never would have happened.
Laura Shapiro
PositiveBookforumThat she’s selected her subjects this time not from a specific era but according to her own interests is a gamble, but her nose for a good story doesn’t fail her. It turns out that these women have more in common than you might imagine. They’re linked, like women everywhere, by the covert methods they used to acquire whatever power was available to them. At a moment when women have far more overt ways of expressing their desire for influence—if not fully exerting it—it’s instructive to see the gains Shapiro’s heroines made via more subterranean methods. Each one, in her own way, used food as both 'her shield and her weapon.'
