An exhaustive and lively assemblage, best for snacking rather than gorging.
Bestselling food historian Kurlansky (Salt, 2002, etc.) collects writing from two millennia that describes with wit and zest cooks, cooking, and cuisines.
Dividing the book into such sections as “Memorable Meals,” and “Their Just Desserts,” Kurlansky relies on a range of authors from Martial to Orwell. In his introduction, he suggests that writing about food has always been as much about culture, philosophy, and natural history, a way for writers to approach “the fundamental subjects of the human condition.” Many of the selections in this comprehensive collection support his point. Celebrating the delights of mint sauce, new potatoes, brown bread, and marmalade, George Orwell characteristically adds that they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. Plutarch, profiling the great gourmand Lucullus, details how this once famous statesman and general in his declining years spent his days (and money) on ostentatiously extravagant feasts. Selections from familiar food writers like M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, and James Beard cover topics as varied as bachelor cooking, hot chocolate, and the garlic press, which David asserts is both ridiculous and pathetic. More unexpected are the extracts from Thoreau on cranberries and watermelon, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings on okra and Hush Puppies, and Hemingway on fishing in the Seine. Early cookbook authors like Hannah Glass, Fanny Farmer, and Mrs. Beeton are frequently cited on apple pies, endives, and potatoes; commentators from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries add their observations on salt-making (Aobo Tu), olive oil (Platina), and spinach (Giacomo Castelvetro). There are essays on truffles, the preparing of a royal feast (at least 6,000 eggs for each day of the feast), and the best chocolate (found in France according to Brillat-Savarin). Extracts describing the ordinary (bread and scrambled eggs) as well as the exotic (bird nest soup and stuffed dormice) complement more generalized writing on national tastes or the politics and meaning of food.
An exhaustive and lively assemblage, best for snacking rather than gorging.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45710-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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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