An amazing journey, though the organization is meandering and digressive—frequently scattershot but ultimately satisfying.
New Mexico–based food researcher and author DeWitt (The Essential Hot Spice Guide, 2013, etc.) traces the Earth-changing ramifications of the “Columbian Exchange,” which brought indigenous American foods like chili peppers, maize and turkey back to the Old World and transformed the world’s diet.
The author happily admits that he is a chili fanatic, so it is with chili peppers that he is most sympathetic and interesting. He begins the journey from the prehistoric Mayan village of Cerén, now in El Salvador, which was buried in a volcanic eruption in A.D. 590 and which revealed the oldest evidence of chili-growing and -eating outside of Mexico. Christopher Columbus remarked on many of the unfamiliar foods he observed the natives of Puerto Rico consuming with gusto—e.g., chilis, maize, sweet potatoes, pineapple and cacao bean (chocolate). He brought many of these foods back to show the astonished Spaniards. On his second voyage, he deposited many Old World foods in America that would similarly enrich (or change adversely) the American diet and enterprise, such as sugar cane, wheat, melons, fruit trees, and livestock like pigs, cattle and sheep. Both turkey and pineapple became great favorites at European courts, while the potato was scorned as “pig food,” and the tomato was suspected of being poisonous and had to wait much longer to truly be appreciated. The author doggedly pursues how Hungarian paprika was born, thanks to the Turkish traders and occupiers, and he also examines Indian curry, as chilis mixed marvelously with the ancient spices of that land. Felicitous matches occurred with the New World pairing of cacao bean and vanilla with Old World sugar and coffee, while American foods like peanuts, sweet potatoes and avocados became valuable staples in African cuisine.
An amazing journey, though the organization is meandering and digressive—frequently scattershot but ultimately satisfying.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-309-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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