O’Connell is a perky companion for this buffet of historical snacks.
History Channel and A&E Networks chief historian O’Connell uses food to chronicle the history of the United States.
Each of the 10 chapters contains a variety of bites (or sips, in the case of bourbon, the mint julep, coffee and tea) focusing on a food or food trend, such as commercial canning, freezing, the invention of condensed milk and the 1950s phenomenon of TV dinners. The author’s enthusiasm for her subject results in frequent exclamations: “Yes, takeout food is not the modern convenience you thought it was!” she writes after disclosing that pea soup was sold by street vendors in ancient Athens. “Would the Real Pepper Please Stand Up!” is the title of a sidebar about Christopher Columbus’ search for black pepper. Along with history, O’Connell offers recipes for such delights as Colonial Syllabub (major ingredient: white wine or sherry), Brunswick Stew (squirrel can be substituted by rabbit; “If you are using squirrel,” writes the author, “do not include the brains”), Old Eel Pie and Scrapple. Like many miniencyclopedias, this one is studded with often intriguing facts: Roast beaver tail (“News flash! Today, Americans no longer consider beavertail a desirable food!”) was a delicacy in Colonial America due to its high fat content; for fur trappers, it could be “the ideal supper.” In the 1500s, Londoners called a certain big bird “turkey” because they thought it first had been imported from that country. Eleanor Roosevelt, not a cook, nevertheless could make creditable scrambled eggs. When a Raytheon scientist demonstrated microwave power by popping corn, the “puffed kernels flew around his laboratory during his trial presentation.” The author also shares her own food preferences: frozen tiny baby peas; an oyster dressing of chili sauce, horseradish and fresh lemon juice; crème caramel, which she served to a handsome visitor to her family’s house—and whom she married.
O’Connell is a perky companion for this buffet of historical snacks.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492603023
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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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