Those with a taste for Southwestern cuisine will find their hunger satiated by this readable, authoritative culinary and...
Anthropology, recipes, and conversational storytelling find an appealing blend in a labor-of-love volume by the prolific, widely traveled Arizona-based author.
McNamee (Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, 2011, etc.) points out that he has been writing this book “all my life,” and his experience shows. He traces the region, its inhabitants, and their diets back to prehistoric times, including the simplest of possible recipes for “roast mastodon.” Beginning with the era of exploration, the author shows how new cultures, tastes, and ingredients combined with the region’s natural resources to expand the ever changing cuisine. “Corn, beans, squash, chiles, the four essential plants in the cuisine of the Southwest, along with various animal proteins,” he writes. “Put them together, and you have the makings of an adventurous, nonrepetitive, even exciting cuisine…a storied and varied food tradition that extends back thousands of years.” As settlers extended the region, the cuisine expanded as well, with the dry desert of Arizona producing different twists on the basic elements from seafood-rich Southern California. The cattle country of Texas and the flame-cooking traditions of black settlers descended from slaves spawned the barbecue celebrated in that state, different from the pork-dominated barbecue throughout the eastern part of the South. One origin theory for the chimichanga suggests that it’s a crossbreed between the burrito and the Chinese egg roll, as immigrant cultures borrowed from and adapted to each other. “People from one culture meet people from another culture,” writes McNamee, “and in time they become a third culture, neither one nor the other.” The author extends the menu well beyond the clichés of Southwestern food, telling how California gave birth to chop suey and the first Italian restaurant in the U.S. as well as the fast-food franchising industry, all trends that have spread across the country and throughout the world.
Those with a taste for Southwestern cuisine will find their hunger satiated by this readable, authoritative culinary and cultural history. (Disclosure: Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews.)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8263-5904-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of New Mexico
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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 Yorkerstaff 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
