Breaking the Silence: Inspirational Stories of Black Cancer Survivors
Author: Karin L Stanford
Cancer survivors, their family members, and their friends will find comfort in these inspirational stories told by black cancer patients. Covering every facet of the disease as it affects a person's life, including diagnosis, treatment, family involvement, spiritual strength, and healing, these stories, poems, journal entries, and letters address such complex issues as coping with the shock of the initial diagnosis, deciding among various forms of treatments, and dealing with conflicting emotions of anger, sadness, and hope. Helping to heal the mind, body, and spirit, these courageous and thoughtful reflections seek to lighten the burden that all cancer survivors and those who care for them must bear. Celebrated poet and cancer survivor Nikki Giovanni contributes a moving introduction to these inspirational pieces.
New interesting textbook: Raising a Moody Child or Surviving the Teenage Hormone Takeover
Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears
Author: Madeleine Ferrieres
Contemporary concerns about food such as those stemming from mad cow disease, salmonella, and other potential food-related dangers are hardly new-humans have long been wary of what they eat. Beyond the fundamental fear of hunger, societies have sought to protect themselves from rotten, impure, or unhealthy food. From the markets of medieval Europe to the slaughterhouses of twentieth-century Chicago, Madeleine Ferrières traces the origins of present-day behavior toward what we eat as she explores the panics, myths, and ever-shifting attitudes regarding food and its safety. She demonstrates that food fears have been inspired not only by safety concerns but also by cultural, political, and religious prejudices.
Flour from human bones and pâté from dead cats are just two of the more unappetizing recipes that have scared consumers away from certain foods. Ferrières considers the roots of these and other rumors, illuminating how societies have assessed and attempted to regulate the risks of eating. She documents the bizarre and commonsensical attempts by European towns to ensure the quality of beef and pork, ranging from tighter controls on butchers to prohibiting Jews and menstruating women from handling meat. Examining the spread of Hungarian cattle disease, which ravaged the livestock of seventeenth-century Europe, Ferrières recounts the development of safety methods that became the Western model for fighting animal diseases.
Ferrières discusses a wealth of crucial and curious food-related incidents, trends, and beliefs, including European explorers' shocked responses to the foodways of the New World; how some foods deemed unsafe for therich were seen as perfectly suitable for the poor; the potato's negative reputation; the fierce legal battles between seventeenth-century French bread bakers and innkeepers; the role of the medical profession in food regulation; and how modern consumerism changed the way we eat. Drawing on history, folklore, agriculture, and anthropology, Ferrières tells us how our decisions about what not to eat reflect who we are.
Kirkus Reviews
An impressively researched addition to the Arts and Traditions of the Table series. French historian Ferrieres (Social History/Univ. of Avignon) has dug deep and wide in her exploration of anxieties about food: agricultural statistics, medical and veterinary journals, public health records, royal decrees, city and town ordinances and cookery manuals. Human fears about food, she notes, fall into two categories: concern about quantity and worry over quality. Her focus here is on the latter. Although she discusses Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, she gives the United States relatively short shrift, for Ferrieres's emphasis is on European, especially French, history. Her research turns up some fascinating facts, such as that in 14th-century Europe, horror of leprosy led to the erroneous belief that one could get it by consuming "leprous pork"; later, cabbage, cheese, beer and gamay grapes were also suspect. One bizarre tale involves a lawsuit in 1668 between Paris bakers and innkeepers in which bakery bread was alleged to be unhealthy because it was made with yeast; to settle the question, doctors weighed in, as did public prosecutors, judges, police and even parliament. European reactions-suspicion, aversion, phobia-of unfamiliar foods encountered in the New World are explored, as are some wild food rumors; e.g., English porter is made stronger than European beers by the addition of a skinned dog to the vat. She shows how food fears changed as industrialization distanced the consumer from the producer, examines the gap between scientific knowledge and political power in response to food risks and looks at the role of individual responsibility forfood safety. A densely written, scholarly work, not especially accessible but filled with choice nuggets of food lore, culinary information and social history.
