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THE UNITED BURGER STATES OF AMERICA

Name: THE UNITED BURGER STATES OF AMERICA
Author: Peter Biddlecombe
ISBN: 0-349-11606-7

by Peter Biddlecombe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2003

Snide and strained.

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A veteran British travel writer divides the US into food-related areas—and delivers a bilious tour of the union.

Choosing unbridled rant over nuanced reportage, Biddlecombe wisecracks his way across the country, offering jokes, opinions, and hearsay as fact. His categories are burger states, bun states, cheese, bacon, salad, french-fry, relish, ketchup, salt, fruity, and drinks states. Starting his journey in Virginia, a meaty state in the burger division, he delivers a preachy riff on the Constitution, which proclaimed equality but ignored slavery. True, of course, but Biddlecombe continues on righteously angry and critical wherever he goes. Only chicken-burger state Kentucky seems to please, largely because of horseracing. Congress, made up largely of felons, promises but fails to deliver aid to the Third World. The presidency is nonsensical, the US the most crime-ridden society in the world. The author describes a Harvard business professor as a “hop-head hackedemic,” Detroit as the Third World without aid organizations, the air in North Carolina (a bacon state) as a mixture of methane, ammonia, and chlorine, and its inhabitants as big on religion, their kind of religion. In New York (another bacon state), he asserts that Jews may only be ten percent of the population, but they make themselves felt by yelling, arguing, donating, and voting. Fruity state Vermont is “smothered in maple syrup . . . Norman Rockwell, Forrest Gump,” and California (another fruity state) is “like one of those big, horrible, healthy bowls of muesli: nothing but fruit and nuts.” Biddlecombe spends a lot of time in bars chatting to the locals, who feed him dicey facts and tall tales; he visits small towns as well as big cities, seeing the sights from Colonial Williamsburg to the Texas stockyards; and he takes in local bookshops, giving uncharacteristically favorable reviews to Powell’s in Portland, Oregon (drinks state, coffee division), and a nameless “great, old-time, rambling, dusty secondhand bookshop” outside Stowe, Vermont.

Snide and strained.

Pub Date: June 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-349-11606-7

Page Count: 410

Publisher: Abacus/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.