by William Sitwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2013
Good fun, though best taken in small bites; the chatty tone can be cloying in large amounts.
British food writer/editor Sitwell explores shifting tastes and styles in cooking through individual dishes.
The author begins in the second millennia B.C. with a bread recipe, including an ancient Egyptian wall painting to illustrate the methods involved. The early recipes are quite vague; Sitwell notes that well into the 19th century, with fine cuisine limited to aristocratic mansions, published cookbooks were generally expositions of food philosophy by male chefs who “wouldn’t want [their] rivals to get hold of [their] kitchen secrets.” Cooking times began to appear during the Renaissance, and it was the influential Victorian manual for anxious wives Beeton’s Book of Household Management that popularized the practice of listing the ingredients separately from instructions. Mrs. Beeton’s roly-poly jam pudding (1861) joins a cavalcade of quintessentially British items, including “peas soope” (1669), but Sitwell gives ample space to such revered Frenchmen as Brillat-Savarin (stuffed roast pheasant, 1825) and Escoffier (peach Melba, 1903). No-nonsense Americans like Fannie Farmer (strawberry shortcake, 1896) and The Joy of Cooking’s Irma Rombauer (quick oatmeal cookies, 1931) also get their due, though Sitwell is dubious about modern shortcuts like microwaves and bagged salads. Virtually all the big names of the late-20th-century food revolution are here, from Alice Waters (plum tart, 1971) to Ferran Adrià (an extremely elaborate brioche with rose-scented mozzarella, 2008), as well as such mass-market stalwarts of the Food Network as Emeril Lagasse (pecan waffles, 1998) and Nigella Lawson (fairy cakes, 2000). Sitwell deftly inserts interesting tidbits ranging from the changes wrought by such appliances as refrigerators and gas stoves to the impact of online technology. Indeed, the recipes are basically an excuse for the history, which is fine when the history is this engaging.
Good fun, though best taken in small bites; the chatty tone can be cloying in large amounts.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-22997-5
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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