Filled with loving portraits of quirky characters, Majumdar’s series of vignettes is a candid and endearing snapshot of not...
A food writer’s cross-country search for what it means to be an American.
Yorkshire-raised food writer and Food Network personality Majumdar (Eating for Britain: A Journey Into the Heart (and Belly) of the Nation, 2011, etc.) recently relocated from his beloved Britain to Los Angeles to live with his girlfriend. However, after several years of American life, he was still bewildered by the prospect of becoming a “true” American. What, exactly, does that mean? Knowing from experience that food is the easiest way to a culture’s heart, the author embarked on a coast-to-coast tour seeking out culinary enclaves to find the secret to Americanness. One of Majumdar’s first lessons was that ethnicity and food culture often go hand in hand, and his experiences among the burgeoning yet still largely unrecognized Filipino community of Los Angeles prove that ethnic groups eat traditional food with a sense of pride for their homeland but also incorporate contemporary style and conventions. Not all of his experiences were as gratifying. His trip to Philadelphia’s annual Wing Bowl alongside competitive eater Jamie McDonald was truly an American experience: “I’d be hard pressed to think of any other nation on earth where a competition to watch twenty three men eat as many chicken wings as they could in thirty minutes would attract 23,000 spectators, including every stripper in the city, at 7am.” Other highlights include goat’s head in the Bronx, a Nebraska meatpacking plant, and rather expected trips to Wisconsin and Alaska for cheese making and salmon fishing. But these are only a few examples from Majumdar’s diverse, patchworklike collection of foodie experiences. Regardless of where his travels took him, the author learned that if there is any constant throughout American culture, it’s that we love to eat and are proud of our food.
Filled with loving portraits of quirky characters, Majumdar’s series of vignettes is a candid and endearing snapshot of not only American food culture, but America itself.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-215-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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