Jacobsen may leave noncoastal readers drooling with jealousy, but vicarious oyster slurping is better than none.
This verbally and visually succulent book covers 99 types of oysters, most from the shores of North America.
Ten years after A Geography of Oysters, James Beard Award–winning author Jacobsen (Apples of Uncommon Character, 2014, etc.) chronicles his travels from British Columbia down to Seattle, across the Gulf Coast, and from North Carolina up to Nova Scotia, with detours to Ireland, France, and New Zealand. There may be, as he notes, only five widely distributed species of edible oysters, but the look and taste of these species vary widely based on the “merroir” (the marine equivalent of “terroir”) in which they grow up and the way that they are treated as they grow. The author’s appreciation of even the least prepossessing of these bivalves is infectious. Jacobsen makes the case that “every oyster is a tide pool in miniature, a poem built of salt water and phytoplankton that nods to whatever motes of meaning shaped it.” The lavishly illustrated volume consists of mini-essays on the geography and people of the regions in which oysters grow wild or are farmed—Jacobsen favors the carefully farmed varieties—and two-page spreads on each of the types he features, as well as a few carefully culled recipes, a list of oyster bars at which he has enjoyed his subjects, and a glossary of terms like “flupsy” and “pluff mud.” Each of the entries covers species, cultivation, obtainability, flavor, and “presence.” The latter two are where the author lets his imagination soar: East Beach Blondes, farmed in Rhode Island, taste like “brine and ozone; a boardwalk in the rain”; Maine’s wild-harvested Belons remind him of “hazelnuts and anchovies fried in seal fat, with a squishy crunch like jellyfish salad.” In terms of presence, New Brunswick’s Beausoleils are “as clean and inoffensive as a Jehovah’s Witness,” and wild James River specimens have “oversized muscles and a pale potbelly, like an aging professional wrestler.”
Jacobsen may leave noncoastal readers drooling with jealousy, but vicarious oyster slurping is better than none.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-256-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08394-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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