A helpful, amusing, no-nonsense oyster manual for the layperson.
The briny underbelly of one of the world’s most respected seafoods.
James Beard Award winner Walsh (Are You Really Going to Eat That?, 2003, etc.) begins his journey in Galveston Bay, whose muddy yet plentiful waters he navigates to explain the nuts and bolts of oyster fishing. From dredging procedures to vibrio vulnificus, a deadly bacteria found in Gulf oysters, he lays bare the industry’s foundations while taking time to explain its competitive nature in a landscape of short seasons and state laws prohibiting outside imports. Walsh faithfully consumes mass quantities of his subject—raw, fried or even pressurized—and takes care to elaborate. He deliciously conveys the spectrum of oyster varieties and flavors, ranging from sweet and milky to salty and nutty. The further Walsh strays from his Texas roots—destinations include New Orleans, Ireland, New York City and Toronto—the sharper his accounts. It would have been nice, however, if he’d offered more elaborate descriptions of personalities he met along the way, in addition to the oysters they serve. Characters who particularly call out for fuller portraits include the New Fulton Fish Market’s grizzly fishermen and Don Quinn, founder of England’s Alternative Oyster Feast, a faux-festival instituted to rail against upper-class food snobbery. Aspiring gourmets will appreciate the recipes sprinkled throughout, from the legendary Oysters Rockefeller to the Grand Central Oyster Bar’s Pan Roast. Walsh borrows descriptions from gastronomes Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and M.F.K. Fisher to expound upon taste and historic feats of consumption—not necessarily a good idea, since they enhance but also and outshine his own depictions. Thankfully, backdoor discoveries soon recapture the spotlight. Oysters from the same region typically have similar taste, the author reveals, regardless of how varieties from Long Island, the Chesapeake and Washington are marketed. “It’s impossible to identify where oysters come from,” he learns from the eccentric biologist who owns the Seasalter Shellfish company in England. “Anybody can tell you anything about where their oysters come from and nobody can prove a thing.”
A helpful, amusing, no-nonsense oyster manual for the layperson.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58243-457-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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