An erudite and entertaining historical biography of a food pioneer with particular interest for gastronomes and agriculture...
The story of an intrepid botanist who exposed America to myriad exotic plants and food crops.
While conducting research for an article, National Geographic staff writer Stone stumbled on a map showing the origins of popular foods that became domesticated in America. This discovery, as well as the author’s lifelong fascination with tropical fruit, spurred a great exploration for perennially curious American botanist David Fairchild (1869-1954), who scoured the planet foraging for new foods and plants with which to enrich and tantalize American palates. Employing dogged research and close scrutiny of his subject’s letters, rough drafts, and “ponderings on the backs of envelopes and napkins,” the author delves into many different aspects of Fairchild’s life. These include his seafaring adventures visiting more than 50 countries, his insatiable hunger to uncover new produce varieties and promote homeland agricultural development, and the harsh criticism his work continually garnered. Fairchild’s assignments as a junior scientist with the then budget-challenged Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., and encouragement from world-traveling philanthropist Barbour Lathrop whetted his wanderlust for far-flung destinations, where he came across such exotic plants as the Hass avocado in Chile, seedless grapes in Padua, cherry blossoms in Japan, and potent hop plant flowers in Bohemia, which pointed to significant beer-crafting potential. Stone also provides details of the political struggle Fairchild faced. While his work enriched the agricultural climate of the country, congressional opponents felt that his methodical importation of new, farm-sourced, organic plant and produce varieties would compromise and even jeopardize native botanical species. Narrated in vividly realized, richly descriptive text with accompanying photographs, Stone’s biography reanimates the legacy of an important contributor to the botanical diversity of America. Indeed, Fairchild’s agricultural discoveries revolutionized the formerly bland eating habits of Americans and helped establish the country’s own culinary identity.
An erudite and entertaining historical biography of a food pioneer with particular interest for gastronomes and agriculture enthusiasts.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-99058-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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