Useful as a textbook, the volume is a rewarding read for anyone who eats, cooks, or muses about food.
A literary feast for foodies.
In this encyclopedic contribution to the burgeoning field of food studies, poet and literary scholar Gilbert (Emerita, English/Univ. of California, Davis; The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity, 2014, etc.) and restaurant critic Porter (English/Reed Coll.; Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers, 2011, etc.) bring together pieces by nearly 100 writers: poets, novelists, essayists, cooks, diners, and food critics. The population is diverse and the entries often witty, lively, and entertaining. Anton Chekhov, Seamus Heaney, and M.F.K. Fisher reflect on oysters; Louisa May Alcott, on the doomed project of Fruitlands, a utopian community whose founders—including her father—knew nothing about planting or harvesting and nearly starved themselves and their families. Proust recalls the madeleine; William Carlos Williams exults on plums; Calvin Trillin recounts his effort to lure his daughter from California to New York by promising her pumpernickel bagels. Restaurant critic Ruth Reichl (who also contributes the preface) calls her mother “The Queen of Mold” because she thought nothing about serving spoiled food to her family and guests. Erica Jong offers a sensuous meditation on the onion, and food writer Jeffrey Steingarten reveals his efforts to overcome his many food phobias, including kimchi, clams, and anything blue. One section focuses on the connection of food to identity, family, and ethnicity, with contributions from Ntozake Shange, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. “Food Politics” includes entries by environmentalists Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and Barbara Kingsolver. Vegetarians defend their choices, as do carnivores and omnivores, and there are several exposés of bad practices (Upton Sinclair, Eric Schlosser). As in all Norton anthologies, entries are short, many edited from longer works; all have informative headnotes, and each section contains an introduction.
Useful as a textbook, the volume is a rewarding read for anyone who eats, cooks, or muses about food.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-23984-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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