Melissa Ditmore

Four Lions

beth — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 21:33:00 +0000

Four Lions, produced and directed by Chris Morris, satirizes terrorists and the response to terrorism in modern Britain. Every character is flawed and every person is spoofed. No one is spared; police, politicians, local working stiffs, neighborhood religious fanatics, and the floozie next door are lampooned with great one-liners and riotous insults. This may sound insensitive, but the humor does not obscure hard issues. Rather, it makes them approachable: you’ll likely want to talk about this funny and unexpectedly sad film after seeing it.

The film’s strength is in offering a point of view that for most is simply unthinkable and unsympathetic: the perspective of four British Muslims who attempt jihad and plot suicide bombings. Morris’s incompetent and conflicted would-be martyrs are mostly likable oafs, the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, as if Harold and Kumar waged jihad under the tutelage of Twitter’s Al Qaeda. This sympathetic perspective is most disturbing as each meets his violent end, sometimes regretfully. The humor makes discussion possible.

I was deeply curious to see this film because I wondered whether the balance of humor and serious issues could be applied to this topic. I’m not convinced that such satire would work with more nuanced matters than suicide bombers or topics that are not thoroughly polarized. Polarization made Citizen Ruth work, but the difficulties presented by more subtle issues may be the reason that humor is rarely used to promote discussion. It’s not easy to be funny or enlightening, and to do so at the same time seems near impossible when talking about something, well, serious.

While Four Lions is a great discussion tool, it is less successful as entertainment. It’s funny, and the characters are always engaging, but the story wanders a bit because it’s both satire and buddy movie, and these elements do not entirely work together. The film does not have universal appeal. That said, the biggest downside is that you may never get rid of the earworm “Dancing in the Moonlight” after the movie ends.

Written by: Melissa Ditmore, November 5th 2010

The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes Carnivores Will Devour

gita — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Kim O’Donnel

Da Capo Press

The recipes in The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook are very good. This cookbook is perfect for people who want to cut down on their meat consumption. Kim O’Donnel describes her motivation for writing this book as the realization that she and her family needed to cut down on their meat consumption for health and environmental reasons. O’Donnel is not a member of a vegetarian cult and does not want to recruit others. She wants to add delicious vegetarian recipes to the meat-heavy North American diet.

To that end, the recipes are organized into fifty-two menus, enough for one year of one meatless dinner each week, and the menus are grouped seasonally to reflect what is available in most regions of the U.S. during that time. Ingredients were selected with supermarket availability in mind so procuring organic virgin unicorn hair is not necessary. The book includes resources for the few items that may not be in the supermarket as well as more readily available substitutes.

People who have experience cooking vegetarian food will be familiar with many of the dishes included in this cookbook, but everyone could benefit from the section, “Kitchen Tricks for Your Sleeve.” “Metric Conversions” and “Resources” are two more universally useful sections in the book. O’Donnel has a folksy writing style and trusts the reader to use ingredients that they have and like, as exemplified in asides about her differences with her husband about the use of sugar in cornbread and noting that home cooks should use their preferences as a guide.

This book offers useful tools to expand one’s cooking repertoire. For example, one menu features ways to cook beans and rice, with varied seasonings for white beans, black beans and pinto or kidney beans, essentially explaining what flavors typically work well with different varieties of beans. This is the kind of information that the reader can build on, and makes this the perfect cookbook for people who are learning to cook. The quibbles I have with the cookbook are that it lacks total cooking and prep times and, as a result, takes some consideration to determine which are the best school-night meals.

Written by: Melissa Ditmore, October 26th 2010

The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:01:00 +0000

By Sonia Shah

Sarah Crichton Books

Vampire mania has taken hold and Sonia Shah’s The Fever goes back in time before Twilight and even Dracula to the first vampires: mosquitoes and their parasites. Shah tells a good story, and this story has everything from drama and risk to villains and exotic locations. The villain is malaria, the exotic locations cross the globe over the past millennia, and the drama and risk are life-and-death situations. Shah documents her research well and conveys a great deal of information about these unlovely Plasmodium parasites, and the mosquitoes that transmit them, without overwhelming the reader or becoming depressing.

This well-documented book covers historical, social, and medical aspects of the disease, its vectors, and human response in separate chapters. Chapters cover each topic chronologically; the chapter on medical research details competing theories from Italy and England, eventual collaboration from the United States, priorities that appall (including racist and classist application of prevention and treatment methods), and the scholarly conclusion that malaria (like everything) must be addressed locally and that efforts combating malaria must be informed by local conditions and life. This last has been ignored, with every effort to find a profitable magic bullet.

On one hand, it’s reassuring that malaria is not unique in this way. The same has been said, and ignored, about other public health issues like HIV; criminal issues like vice; and every feminist issue discussed beyond its social, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. On the other hand, it’s depressing that the same lessons are learned and forgotten in so many contexts. Shah’s investigation into the history of malaria renders her clear-eyed about the ways current efforts to combat malaria may be effective today, but lead to new resistance and a repeat of short-term gains followed by a resurgence once malaria is no longer chic for celebrities and donor organizations to campaign against. (The book was written before this year’s announcement that scientists have genetically engineered mosquitoes resistant to malaria parasites, and I look forward to Shah's opinion of this development.)

Shah places blame for the persistence of this scourge not only on malaria’s tenacity and ability to mutate quickly but also on profiteers from the Dutch colonizers of Indonesia to Novartis, geopolitical events, and vested interests. Some of these include the role of the Vietnam War in the proliferation of malaria; the denial of effective treatment; and apathy from people who live with malaria, a low priority among a long list of worries. But Shah is not full of invective. Rather, she explains why malaria is seen as a normal part of life in places where malaria is endemic, even as she explains that declines in rates of malaria are associated with decreased fatalities from all other diseases, prompting greater concern about a disease that compromises health and well being beyond its own deaths.

Lay readers of science will be interested in this book, as will anyone skeptical about coexistence with microbes or interested in public health efforts.

Written by: Melissa Ditmore, July 26th 2010