Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.
A lively history of the Ohio River region in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.
McCullough (The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, 2015, etc.) isn’t writing about the sodbusters and hardscrabblers of the Far West, the people whom the word “pioneers” evokes, but instead their predecessors of generations past who crossed the Appalachians and settled in the fertile country along and north of the Ohio River. Manasseh Cutler, one of his principal figures, “endowed with boundless intellectual curiosity,” anticipated the movement of his compatriots across the mountains well before the war had ended, advocating for the Northwest Ordinance to secure a region that, in McCullough’s words, “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life”—a place in which slavery was forbidden and public education and religious freedom would be emphasized. “Ohio fever” spread throughout a New England crippled, after the war, by economic depression, but Southerners also moved west, fomenting the conditions that would, at the end of McCullough’s vivid narrative, end in regional war three generations later. Characteristically, the author suggests major historical themes without ever arguing them as such. For example, he acknowledges the iniquities of the slave economy simply by contrasting the conditions along the Ohio between the backwaters of Kentucky and the sprightly city of Cincinnati, speaking through such figures as Charles Dickens. Indeed, his narrative abounds with well-recognized figures in American history—John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Johnny Appleseed—while highlighting lesser-known players. His account of Aaron Burr—who conspired to overthrow the government of Mexico (and, later, his own country) after killing Alexander Hamilton, recruiting confederates in the Ohio River country—is alone worth the price of admission. There are many other fine moments, as well, including a brief account of the generosity that one farmer in Marietta, Ohio, showed to his starving neighbors and another charting the fortunes of the early Whigs in opposing the “anti-intellectual attitude of the Andrew Jackson administration.”
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6868-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
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A thoughtful and detailed book to be savored—but not on an empty stomach.
The history of British food, beginning with a tough grain that was all the rage among Neolithic farmers.
That was einkorn, in 4000 BCE. From there, Colquhoun (The Busiest Man in England: A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect & Victorian Visionary, 2006, etc.) moves through Roman feasts calling for ample servings of flamingo, sumptuous Georgian meals relying heavily on melted butter, the class-inflected foodie mania of the mid-1980s and the increasingly processed, commercialized foodstuffs we rely on today. Refreshingly free of jokes about British cooking, her text uses cookery through the ages to explain everything from the British Isles’ waves of invaders and immigrants to class conflict and consciousness, patriotism and terror during World War II rationing. The prose is occasionally stiff and often overly formal, but it thoroughly recounts the fascinating history of an empire. And Colquhoun can reach passionate heights, as in this passage about Victorian celebrity cook Eliza Acton, who “turned away from melted butter to its French equivalent—rich, unguent mayonnaise made by working drops of oil carefully into whisked egg yolks to form a smooth custard, coloured green with parsley juice or flavoured with a pea-sized piece of bruised garlic or a drop of tarragon vinegar.” As it seems most modern books about food must, this one laments meals gone by. “We buy green beans from Kenya and asparagus from Peru without considering its absurdity,” notes the author, who wonders whether this generation will be the last to know fresh fruits picked straight from the vine or bread collected that day from the baker. In discussing Britons’ tormented relationship with eating, Colquhoun points out that “we spend more on the slimming industry than we do on aid for the starving.” They’re not alone: Americans fork out an estimated $30 to $40 billion annually on weight-loss programs and products.
A thoughtful and detailed book to be savored—but not on an empty stomach.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-410-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A contemporary window on a remarkable friendship and a divisive decade, which should give considerable pause to those who...
An intriguing and illuminating correspondence between two of America's earliest cold warriors.
In 1948, Whittaker Chambers (himself a former Communist agent then employed as a senior editor at Time magazine) exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. At no small cost, he made his accusation stick, and the liberal poster boy eventually served five years in a federal penitentiary on perjury charges. In the meantime, Manhattan-based de Toledano (then a Newsweek reporter) became a trusted friend of the wary Chambers, who had retreated to a working farm he owned in Maryland. The two soon began writing each other with some regularity, and their letters offer the hair-down commentary of insiders on an eventful era during which Hiss was twice in the dock; de Toledano published Seeds of Treason, a conservative tome; Chambers had an even more successful bestseller (his memoir Witness); the Korean conflict raged; and the political fortunes of Richard Nixon waxed, then waned. Deeply concerned about the Red Menace, the perceived perfidy of the left, and the future of conservatism, the pen pals could be gossipy, even snide, in their assessments of allies, intellectual or otherwise—William Buckley, Bennett Cerf, Dwight Eisenhower, Arthur Koestler, Henry Luce, Joseph McCarthy et al. Nor did they shy from sharing workaday worries involving appropriate outlets for the articles they were writing, the inadequate terms of book contracts, and the well-being of their children. In like vein, de Toledano (who turned 81 in August) and Chambers were not above strutting their intellectual stuff. The correspondence tails off in 1957, when Newsweek assigned de Toledano to its Washington bureau (within easy reach of exurban Maryland) and ends altogether less than one year before Chambers's death in mid-1961.
A contemporary window on a remarkable friendship and a divisive decade, which should give considerable pause to those who recall the 1950s as some sort of golden age without strife.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-89526-425-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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