imranperretta-blog

[imranperretta-blog]

Book Review: The Healthy Edit by John Rosenberg

Creative Editing Techniques for Perfecting Your Movie by John Rosenberg

Interminable

The Healthy Edit is a long winded text that reads more like a nostalgic biography of film history than a how-to book on editing. The author uses medical metaphors for improving the “health” of your movie by acting as the “film doctor,” cutting out diseased tissue, stabilizing heart rhythm, psychoanalyzing your patient, improving your bedside manner, etc. Interspersed throughout are callouts of Case Studies, Doctor’s Notes, Doctor’s Orders, and Rx’s.

The author provides most of his examples by referring to films I’ve never seen. And seriously, how many times do I need to be told that the role of the editor is to act like a doctor to rescue a sick film.

As with the human body, there are many things that can go wrong with the film. Fortunately, with humans, our immune systems usually protect us from viral or bacterial intruders. And homeostasis–an amazing phenomenon that is rarely apparent to us until it is disrupted–rules the day. When something is off-balance, however, such as in a fever, sudden pain, dizziness, it becomes immediately obvious . . . and overwhelming. As editors we need to develop the same level of acuity. If a scene runs too long, a performance lacks honesty, or a transition proves jarring, we need to recognize it as if it were an unexpected and grueling stomach ache. Conversely, like the return to normalcy after a protracted illness, we revel in a successfully executed scene. — John Rosenberg

Leaving aside the fact that fever, inflammation, etc., are functions of homeostasis to return the body to health, the example above provides you with an idea of the author’s writing style: long on words and metaphor. I actually resent this book for wasting my time.

Let me put it this way. I was a word processing for over 20 years. If I were to write a book on word processing that was like this book, I would talk about how important the word processor is to creating a healthy document. Acting as a surgeon, I would cut out extraneous words. As a psychoanalyst, I would try to figure out what the writer was trying to say. With proper bedside manner, I would discuss problems with the writer to coax him into changing his text. As an internist, I would use the tools of cut, copy, paste, format font, etc., to tighten up the document, provide flow of text to engage the audience, present a pleasurable format. 

I would tell you how the first mag card I worked with functioned. Then I would give you a history of all the word processing machines and programs that came later–CPT, Wang, IBM, Multi-Mate, WordPerfect, MS Word–and how they enabled me and others to create healthy documents. I would explain how business documents differ from literature or technical manuals. Occasionally, I’ll give you tips, like the role of the M dash, the nonbreaking space, the optional hyphen. I would provide examples referring to documents you’ve never seen and tell you about other word processors, naming some of the documents they produced and how they rescued them from weak writers. And I would repeatedly extol the word processor’s contribution in document creation.

I generously assign this book three stars.

[imranperretta-blog]

Book Review: Against the Grain by Richard Manning

Book Review of How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization by Richard Manning

What to do with all this grain?

What did we lose when we went from roaming the earth in social bands searching for food to settling down in one place to cultivate crops and raise animals? 

We went from a community partaking of a varied diet that supported one another when the hunt was good to one where wealth and power belonged to those with the biggest grain storage bins, animals are treated abominably, and the majority of our calories come from grains. Grains become the ultimate commodity: easily stockpiled and providing dense carbohydrate energy but poor nutrition.

This is not to say that hunter-gatherers did not experience need, hard times, even starvation just as all other animals do. We would be hard-pressed, however, to find communities of any social animal except modern humans in which an individual in a community has access to fifty, a hundred, a thousands times, or even twice as many resources as another. Yet such communities are the rule among post-agricultural humans. — Richard Manning

I don’t believe this book sets out to offer solutions to the problem of agriculture, but it does a fine job in journalistic style of putting forth the various elements that led to the adoption of agriculture and the problems it is causing both humans and the planet. Manning covers such diverse subjects as the development of the human brain, famine, cannibalism, diseases of agriculture, food taboos and fads, and how grains came to dominate the American landscape.

When we look at agriculture today, we see a small number of industrial giants growing rich from the production of a few grains-wheat, corn, and rice-along with hay and the starchy potato. 

Science and industry concentrate their efforts on maximizing the potential of these commodities through genetic modification, fertilization, and improvements in cultivation and harvesting. Small farms are no longer self-determined producers benefiting their communities, but are serfs at the whim and mercy of commodity buyers - and they’re disappearing.

This is a book not just about agriculture but about the fundamental dehumanization that occurred with agriculture. It will argue that most of humanity struck a bitter bargain over the past ten thousand years, trading in a large measure of our sensual lives for the bit of security that comes with agriculture. — Richard Manning

These tax-supported commodities aren’t foods that feed people but grains that are grown in excess, traded, fed to livestock, put in every conceivable packaged product, and then dumped on underdeveloped nations putting local farmers out of business and causing malnourishment and obesity. The concentration of farmland into grain production led to such policies as adding ethanol to fuel and the development of USDA food pyramid. The food pyramid doesn’t reflect nutritional need but the interests of food producers benefiting from the glut.

Manning writes: “I have come to think of agriculture not as farming, but as a dangerous and consuming beast of a social system.” I have to agree. 

Farming to me is the practice of working with the land to produce food that nourishes people, food that can be directly eaten and not processed into something else. Farming is community. Agriculture is exploitation. Perhaps after reading this book you’ll believe that also.

[imranperretta-blog]

Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights by David E. Gumpert

An eye-opening history of the politics of raw milk

David Gumpert is a journalist and author of several business books, and he has now turned his eye to nutrition, specifically raw milk and the politics surrounding it. He is the author of the blog The Complete Patient wherein he reports on issues and events surrounding the raw milk movement. This book ties together much of what he has learned researching this complex issue, and he provides a nonemotional and circumspect view. He also happens to be an excellent writer.

The right to drink raw milk is a battle amongst the raw milk consumers, health authorities, dairy interests, the unfortunate few who have fallen sick after drinking raw milk, the legal agencies who represent them all, and the raw milk dairy farmer just trying to realize a dream. 

Farmers want to produce healthy, bacteria-free milk from humanely raised cows. They all but bend over backwards to comply with licensing and safety laws. But they are constantly pushed off balance and fined into bankruptcy by governmental abuses surrounding food safety issues: farm raids, sting operations, confiscation of property, stiff fines and penalties for minor infractions, burdensome regulations, and legal entanglements.

The media and the healthcare industry constantly pump out the message of the dangers of raw milk and the safety of pasteurization. 

We hear of every person sickened but rarely of the many people who claim to have recovered from various illnesses by drinking this natural product. Those stories are considered anecdotal and written off as meaningless. Scientific studies showing the health benefits of raw milk are ignored.

David writes about several of the children who have become extremely ill from drinking raw milk. 

The stories are indeed moving and provide a glimpse of what could possibly happen to a small minority of individuals who consume contaminated milk. But then, people get sick from all sorts of foods, and no governmental body pursues the elimination of those foods with the fervor shown toward raw milk. In some instances mere association has implicated raw milk, because testing showed that the strain of bacteria present in the children was not a strain present in the milk. Sometimes there was no bacteria in the milk at all.

There is clearly a demand for raw milk by people willing to take the risks, and these people are fighting for food freedom rights. 

Sadly, after reading this book you’ll realize that the government isn’t really interesting in making raw milk safe to protect this growing minority. Government officials consistently show themselves hostile to raw milk farmers and advocates. They won’t attend meetings where raw milk consumers are present. They refuse to talk with David and even go out of their way to avoid him. The FDA is truly unhinged over this issue and the clear goal you will get after reading this book is they simply want to outlaw it. And the dairy industry is lobbying hard to make sure that happens.