A zesty, entertaining romp through the landscape of French food.
A Francophile takes a spirited jaunt through French history, focused on food.
A resident of Paris since 1986, Downie (A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light, 2015, etc.), whose enthusiasm for food and travel has resulted in more than a dozen books, offers a loving, celebratory, and irreverent look at French eating habits, from ancient times to the present. Short, pithy chapters brim with quirky details: frog legs, so quintessentially French, were “beloved of the centurions and gourmets of antiquity”; mustard, too, was a Roman favorite. Not until the 17th century did dining rooms exist in Parisian residences, and knives and forks came late to the French table. In the court of Louis XIV, diners ate “quickly and greedily,” licking their fingers with pleasure. Meals were abundant: “everyone but the poorest devoured unimaginable quantities of meat,” including veal, mutton, beef, and various species of bird, along with eel and fish. In the 1700s, French cuisine became “the unofficial state religion,” and “nouvelle cuisine” was invented, with “theorists, chemists, chefs, philosophers,” and assorted other experts engaged in parsing the meaning of taste “and the differences between gluttons, gourmets, gastronomes, and other varieties of eaters.” The first restaurants appeared in the mid-1700s; by 1789, there were about 50, which burgeoned to 3,000 by 1814. Downie recounts the culinary influence of Grimod de la Reynière and his more famous contemporary Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of many food-related aphorisms. “The destiny of nations,” he wrote, “depends on the way they feed themselves.” The author also offers capsule reviews—not always favorable—of some of Paris’ 10,000 restaurants. He is not a fan of pretension, noise, corporate ownership, stratospheric prices, or what he calls “karaoke cuisine,” characterized by “industrial sauce,” microwaved entrees, “multiple courses for under $20,” and “pink and familiar decor.” His disdain is especially harsh regarding “super-bobo” eateries with “could-be-anywhere cooking.”
A zesty, entertaining romp through the landscape of French food.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08293-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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