A spirited, abundantly illustrated food history.
A celebration of American diversity as seen through its food.
Freedman (History/Yale Univ.; Ten Restaurants That Changed America, 2016, etc.) offers a sweeping, thoroughly researched social and cultural history of America through its changing food habits and practices, from the nation’s founding to the current trend of farm-to-table cuisine. Drawing on cookbooks, culinary histories, advertisements, restaurant menus and reviews, guidebooks, and chef’s memoirs, the author argues convincingly that Americans do have “well-defined and consistent tastes” in food: a “national fondness for sweet, spicy, and salty combinations” and enthusiasm both for regional traditions and for variety. In examining culinary delights from different regions, Freedman points out that “invented traditions infuse regional cuisines, just about everywhere and many ‘traditional’ foods are not as old as most people believe.” If grits and barbecue are unknown in some parts of the South, still, roadside restaurants and cookbooks long have featured dishes—stewed clams from North Carolina and cranberry chiffon pie from Georgia, for example—that evoke particular areas. Variety, though, has been compromised by the rise of agribusiness and supermarkets. Freedman notes that in 1905, 14,000 varieties of apples were grown in the U.S.; by the 1960s, only three were sold in supermarkets. By the end of World War II, processed foods came to be less expensive than fresh ingredients and tempted homemakers with more time for “work, family, and active leisure.” For many decades, consumers accepted processing and lack of diversity as trade-offs for the advantages of “hygienic safety, consistency, [and] affordability.” The author locates the movement against homogenization and standardization in the 1970s, which also saw a decline of French haute cuisine as the ultimate tastemaker. “All the pieces of New American cuisine—farm-to-table, seasonal, and local—were in place by the end of the 1980s,” he writes. Freedman also offers entertaining profiles of many notable chefs, including Alice Waters, Thomas Keller, and René Redzepi, whose influences have reformed how many Americans eat.
A spirited, abundantly illustrated food history.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-462-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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