Other works may examine traditions with more scholarly zeal; this Charles Kuralt-vignette approach has its own charm.
The idea of cookery as vanishing folk heritage has brought some interesting material into print—most recently The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery (p. 630).
Nathan, a Washington Post food writer and culinary preservationist (The Jewish Holiday Kitchen), sets out here to record living traditions in several dozen communities from Rhode Island to Washington State. Matters start off dubiously with ""authentic"" recreations of favorites enjoyed by ""Our Gourmet President,"" Thomas Jefferson. Then, happily, living cooks take over: the doyenne of a church auxiliary in the Armenian-American citadel of Watertown, Mass.; an elderly Vietnamese couple in Maryland; the volunteer chefs for three different Chicago fire department shifts; the staff of the Florida Avenue Grill in Washington, D.C.; a pair of beekeeping health-food buffs near Middlebury, Vt.; the tiny Oaxacan-born cook for an august Napa Valley winery. Some of these people are products of distinctive ethnic traditions; some are farmers, ranchers, or fishermen partly dependent on what they raise or catch; some are plain home cooks, some professionals of one stripe or another. The recipes include a real purist's version of New England baked beans (nothing but beans, salt pork, onions, and a little molasses); green beans in the true, unreconstructed Virginia style (cooked for at least an hour with a lot of slab bacon); mustard and turnip greens with smoked turkey winglets instead of ham hocks (the inspiration of one of the Chicago firehouse artists); braised pheasant with olives for Christmas Eve supper in a Providence Italian enclave. Nathan is not the historian to put the Jefferson material into convincing order; nor has she the instincts of a real folklorist. She is a likable interviewer and observer, though, thoughtful rather than judgmental about the course of culinary change (these days ""Gen Prada spends hours making her kale soup"" and finishes it off with ""a package of Lipton's Onion Soup Mix"").
Other works may examine traditions with more scholarly zeal; this Charles Kuralt-vignette approach has its own charm.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1984
ISBN: 0805239146
Page Count: 360
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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