In this colorful and well-researched history, the author shows persuasively how food has shaped and nourished Southern...
Food serves as a useful lens for examining race, economics, gender and class in the South, from plantation days to the present.
In this authoritative social history, Ferris (American Studies/Univ. of North Carolina; Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, 2005) draws on a rich trove of material, including oral histories, journals, sketchbooks, letters and diaries, as well as cookbooks and published scholarship. In the 19th century, New England–born women, working in the South as governesses, described in detail new culinary experiences: breakfasts featuring several kinds of breads, succotash, hominy and ham; desserts of stewed cherries; peaches finely sliced and served with cream. In letters home, they became “ethnographers of a sort, documenting and critiquing southern society, manners, food, and institutions, including slavery.” One governess, seeing slaves eating their owners’ leftovers, admitted uncomfortably, “I haven’t learned yet how to give my leavings with a good grace.” After the Civil War, plantation owners, unable to farm without slaves, rented land to tenant farmers and sharecroppers, insisting, though, that they grow only cotton or tobacco, profitable cash crops. Forbidden to raise vegetables, the farmers and their families subsisted on a diet of cornmeal, salt pork, beans and molasses, which caused severe malnutrition. Federal relief programs, home economics classes in schools and the advent of industrial farming slowly revived agriculture. By the 1940s, fashioning itself as a tourist destination, the South looked back nostalgically to its “rich culinary heritage,” luring visitors with the attractions of “southern hospitality, culinary artistry, authenticity, and antiquity.” Food was also central to civil rights protests in the 1960s, with sit-ins often staged at restaurants and lunch counters. Ferris sees a true transformation today: Southern cooking, influenced by cosmopolitan chefs with strong ties to the region, revives the use of fresh, local produce from small-scale farms.
In this colorful and well-researched history, the author shows persuasively how food has shaped and nourished Southern identity.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4696-1768-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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