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THE RITUALS OF DINNER

THE ORIGINS, EVOLUTION, ECCENTRICITIES, AND MEANING OF TABLE MANNERS

In Much Depends on Dinner (1987), Visser drew on domestic and natural history, cultural anthropology, and personal observation for a fluent, free-ranging, item-by-item discussion of the separate foods (chicken, salt, ice cream, etc.) assembled for a hypothetical simple company dinner. Here, she applies the same comparative cultural and historical approach to dining etiquette and customs. Visser offers the same mix of scattered facts from other times and cultures and wry references to ``our own'' common practices; quotations from Erasmus, Barthes, Miss Manners, and many more; and, now and then, amusing anecdotes. The result is another feast for trivia-blotters with a taste for class. You can turn to any page and pull out plums on, say, the sequence of courses (the ``plot of the meal'') here, there, and then; the mode of gathering for feasts or family dinners in Africa, Papua New Guinea, ancient Greece, or ``our own'' dining rooms; or the use of alcohol by the Iteso of Kenya and Uganda or the Newars of Katmandu. And who would not be diverted by the news that the Last Supper, famous paintings notwithstanding, was a reclining meal; that the English until the 19th century kept chamber pots for guests' convenience in or just outside their dining rooms; or that Emily Post in 1922 advised hosts unable to provide wine to set out wineglasses anyway and ``pour something pinkish or yellowish into them''? Still, without the earlier book's more substantial subject matter, it is even easier to become numbed by the sheer miscellaneous meandering: the amassing of items without argument or direction; the repetition of much familiar secondary material; the belaboring explanation of what we already know or easily understand. And isn't it past the time when merely pointing out the status connotations of everyday practices, without pressing on to any stimulating insights, is considered perceptive wit?

Pub Date: July 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-8021-1116-5

Page Count: 455

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991

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IN MY PLACE

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

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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