A handsomely illustrated and diverting celebration of a rich if overlooked genre.
Food for thought.
What are menus? What do they contain? And, ultimately, why do they matter? Cooke, a professor of English at McGill University, goes on a richly illustrated journey through three centuries to grapple with these questions, and more. Cooke approaches the broad banquet of menus the way a diner might approach a buffet—by sampling and savoring particular items. Her critical gaze falls first on the careful artistic and design choices menus can embody and on the artists like Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec who have illustrated them. But above all, she writes, menus “pique our interest for the many, rich and varied stories they tell and…for the reminiscences they conjure for original diners and the journeys upon which they allow belated readers to embark.” Menus transcend the ephemeral and in their afterlife illuminate the tastes and traditions of those who came before. Cooke uses dozens of stylish menus as launching points to meditate on the foodways they represent. As belated readers, we can, for example, study world’s fair menus as documents that shed light on national values and priorities or look to the children’s menus commonly found on early-19th-century rail lines for the messages they might tell us about coming of age. Some menus are meant to be mementos of specific events, like a coronation or a meeting between heads of state. These, too, invite the belated reader to consider issues of gastronomy, social history, and more. An adventurous eater (“I myself also have cricket flour on my shelf”), Cooke is an even more undaunted surveyor of foodways past and present who moves across time and culture “both to tempt readers to ask probing questions and to offer satisfying answers to sate their appetites.”
A handsomely illustrated and diverting celebration of a rich if overlooked genre.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781836390671
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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