All in all, a pleasure for foodies, and a satisfying read for students of world history as well.
Historian Fernández-Armesto sinks his teeth into the role of food in human history.
Countless books have been written on this subject, and it must be noted that the author doesn’t have much new to say about it. Still, Fernández-Armesto (History/Oxford Univ.; Civilizations, 2000, etc.) brings storytelling flair and encyclopedic learning to the task and turns in a highly readable if fact-dense survey. In his pages, for instance, the reader will learn that Captain James Cook, among his many other accomplishments, stole a page from the Dutch and introduced sauerkraut (“the only vegetable food which retains reasonable quantities of ascorbic acid in a pickled state”) into the British naval diet, thereby nearly eliminating the risk of death by scurvy; that the general awfulness of Dutch cooking made Netherlanders “exceptionally responsive to the food of other cultures” (whence the good rijstafel and vindaloos of Amsterdam today); that Neolithic settlements in Greece made a robust business of snail farming, providing some of the first archaeological evidence of humans’ herding and breeding animals for food rather than chasing them down in the wild; and that oysters, once considered food fit only for the lower classes, became prized only after they were scarce, while chickens, once eaten only by the well-to-do, lost their cachet when factory farming made chicken meat cheap and accessible. Dotted with anecdotes and trivia, the text also resounds with big themes that lend it substance. Cooking food, Fernández-Armesto observes, is one of the few things people do that other animals do not, making it “at least as good as all the other candidates in an index of the humanity of humankind.” And the quest for new foods is a powerful motor of history, leading to such signal episodes as the Colombian Exchange (by which coffee was introduced to the Americas, tomatoes to Italy, and peppers to India) and the current hubbub over genetic modification.
All in all, a pleasure for foodies, and a satisfying read for students of world history as well.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-2644-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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