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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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