An inventive, amusing guide that’s perfect for those looking to get back to basics in the kitchen.
A cookbook urges a return to traditional methods of harvesting and preparing food.
Don’t let the title mislead you. This work doesn’t offer recipes that feature trolls but rather encourages people to start cooking like the famous folkloric creatures who, unlike their human counterparts, are still “in touch with the realities of the natural world and the rhythms of the year.” Readers who accept Cammell (The Stumpers, 2014, etc.) and Marsh’s (The Mentalist's Handbook, 2018) conceit—that trolls actually exist—will be treated to a quirky, thoughtful guide to old-fashioned cooking. Information is presented seasonally. The opening section, “Winter,” includes instructions on selecting essential tools, like a cast iron pan and a good knife, and an overview of grains as well as straightforward recipes for such dishes as creamed winter greens and cornbread. “Spring” covers foraging everything from cattails to wild roses; roasting meat; and tending a garden. Cheesemaking and fishing are addressed in “Summer” and storing and preserving food in “Autumn.” Interspersed with the practical tips are facts about trolls; folktales that focus on the creatures; and Cammell’s series of delightful color illustrations that depict them. The point is to help readers call up a little of the “old magic” of cooking by passing on processed foods of mysterious origin and modern conveniences like microwaves in favor of locally grown, seasonal food that can be prepared simply. While some recipes are quite elaborate, such as the instructions for concocting a classic plum pudding, others can be easily made by those with little culinary experience and no special tools. The emphasis is on “experimentation, trusting your gut, and using what you can find” instead of turning out Pinterest-perfect meals. While the volume is not specifically aimed at children, parents who are looking for a fun way to teach their kids about food and cooking should find it especially useful. Among adults, those with a taste for whimsy will likely be charmed by the frequent references to trolls and their mythical ways; the less fancifully inclined may find the tone grating.
An inventive, amusing guide that’s perfect for those looking to get back to basics in the kitchen.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9788966-7-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dromedary Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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