A bit of personality and humor interjected into this pastoral lesson might have been the seasoning the author needed to...
A rich, robust epicurean feast for those who enjoy history as a main course.
Dickie (Italian Studies/University College London; Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, 2004, etc.) begins his extensive survey of Italian food in 12th-century Palermo and ends in present-day Genoa. He honors the Italian notion of “civilization of the table,” which “embraces all the many different aspects of a culture that are expressed through food.” Every dish has a story behind it, and the author’s subjects range from spaghetti (“one of the great unifying motifs in Italy’s constantly shifting gastronomic mosaic”) to Parmesan cheese to the meat-dominant cuisine of medieval Milan, where food doubled as medicine. The descriptions of the unique ingredients used in authentic dishes like Palermo’s focaccia (stuffed with veal spleen and strips of lung, fried in lard) or Roman pajata (intestines of an unweaned calf, complete with mother’s milk) may set inexperienced stomachs churning. Venice in the 1300s brings on a discussion of spices. During the Renaissance, Dickie asserts, Italy’s urban food system became more sophisticated due to the conjunction of multicourse meals served to royalty with regal pageantry. The open-air festivals of the early 18th century gave birth to pizza, new technologies in the manufacturing of dried pasta and the further development of tomato sauce, “the lifeblood of Italian food.” Describing with good humor what Italians refer to as the “cornucopia of horrors” that constitutes American eating, Dickie moves from Mussolini to Sophia Loren to the modern Slow Food movement. But the “charisma” of Italian food comes across only in certain sections; the author’s dense history of early Italian cuisine is overly comprehensive, though never entirely inaccessible.
A bit of personality and humor interjected into this pastoral lesson might have been the seasoning the author needed to garner more crossover appeal.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7799-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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