Delicious from start to finish, with only a very few lumps along the way.
A new history of American eating guaranteed to tempt all foodies.
Why don’t Americans eat blood pudding? Who created pumpkin pie, popcorn and rum, and how did such tasty treats come to be staples of the national cuisine? McWilliams (History/Texas State Univ.) details the history of cooking and eating from the early colonies through the Revolutionary War. Colonists, he shows, spurned Native American agriculture and tried to reestablish English gardens in Massachusetts. They did, however, adopt Indian corn; the son of the Massachusetts Bay Colony governor even traveled to London to argue its benefits before the Royal Society. In the Chesapeake Bay area, colonists wanted to fix fancy food that could be served at elegant and impressive dinner parties. Not content merely to regale us with culinary curiosities, the author constantly connects cooking and eating to other political and social matters. An infusion of British cookbooks in the early and middle 18th century, for example, helped instill a sense of belonging in a diverse and disparate group of colonists. Reverse logic prevailed during and after the Revolution, when Americans championed simpler fare. Their tables mirrored their politics; plain eating was a concrete rejection of European cuisine and European society, which Americans perceived as luxurious and effete. McWilliams tells a story of change and adaptation. Newcomers to the colonies brought culinary expectations with them, but eating inevitably evolved as Americans settled in their new home. The author earns points for inclusiveness by attending to the ways in which Native American, African-American and European-American cooking interacted to create a new cuisine. Meanwhile, an inconsistent tone—academic jargon like the anthropological term “foodways” butts heads with self-consciously casual lingo (“This discovery is more than a neat connection”)—is this delightful book’s only flaw.
Delicious from start to finish, with only a very few lumps along the way.Pub Date: July 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-231-12992-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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