Fertel is well-aware that the ground he covers isn't entirely new, but food fans and lovers of Americana alike will go whole...
Fertel (Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, 2014, etc.) mines the small towns of Tennessee and the Carolinas in search of the pinnacle of Southern cuisine: whole hog barbecue.
Growing up in the Cajun heartland of Louisiana, the author missed out on what many regard as the most Southern of food traditions. Not until he joined the Southern Foodways Alliance did he truly discover “real barbecue.” A chance trip to Henderson, Tennessee, introduced Fertel to pitmaster Ronnie Hampton of Siler's Old Time BBQ, and the author spent a steamy morning mesmerized by the grueling labor, smoky flames, and long hours that define whole hog barbecue. Upon first taste, Fertel was transported through the centuries. "I was tasting history, culture, ritual, and race,” he writes. “I was eating the South and all its exceptionalities, commonalities, and horrors....Everything I loathed and everything I loved about the region I called home." From that moment on, the author was driven by a sometimes-distracting zealousness to find every whole hog pitmaster in the South, resulting in this blend of personal, culinary, and regional history. Readers follow Fertel to the heart of it all: Pitt County, North Carolina, where he uncovered the history of the Jones family and their famous Skylight Inn, which in many ways parallels the history of barbecue in America itself. Interweaving culinary and ethnographic history with vibrant character profiles and mouthwatering food writing, Fertel takes readers on an anthropological journey across back country roads and generations to unearth the rich legacy of this art. Mouths will water, but the most discerning readers will likely find the phrase "some of the best barbecue I've ever eaten" and its many permutations growing increasingly meaningless with each utterance.
Fertel is well-aware that the ground he covers isn't entirely new, but food fans and lovers of Americana alike will go whole hog for this loving paean to a distinct tradition.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9397-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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