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. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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