Less comprehensive and more impressionistic than Hasia Diner’s Hungering for America (2002), but a nice, tasty nosh all the...
A pleasing exercise in culinary and cultural history, evoking some favorite New York–centric comfort foods.
Forget the Big Apple: it’s all about meat. Pastrami. Bologna. Sausage. Corned beef. “Judaism has almost always revolved around meat,” writes Merwin (Religion and Judaic Studies/Dickinson Coll.). And if the apple represents forbidden fruit, well, that pile of steaming meat, just the right amount of fat and just the right amount of lean, represents…well, it’s spoiling the fun to tell too much. Suffice it to say that the author, steering a sometimes-difficult course between academia and the mass market, does a solid job of locating the delicatessen—a German Jewish thing, helped along by Ashkenazi leanings and the cured meats of the Alsace—as a cultural and culinary center of New York Jewish life. Merwin delights in oddments of a sociological bent, as when he looks at the claims for the deli as an institution reinforcing marriage: a wife who might work outside the home could still have dinner waiting at the end of the day, leading to domestic tranquility; as one wag whom Merwin cites put it, “the secret of a good marriage…was to live near a delicatessen…if the range were stolen from some of his customers’ kitchens, it would take a month before they would notice the theft.” Much of the narrative is set in a time of Jewish immigration and the concomitant efforts to keep an anchor in the Old World by means of traditional food, Merwin closes at the end of that arc, with an assimilated Jewish culture that has both introduced the deli into wider ethnic circulation but also lost its insularity and adherence to the old ways, especially the insistence on keeping kosher—even if the treat on hand is kosher tapas.
Less comprehensive and more impressionistic than Hasia Diner’s Hungering for America (2002), but a nice, tasty nosh all the same.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8147-6031-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
An earnest, sometimes overwrought, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to link the famed Lewis and Clark expedition to modern environmentalist thought. Botkin (Discordant Harmonies, 1990, etc.), a proponent of the data-heavy New Ecology, sets out to cover the same ground Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did in their 18041806 survey of the Missouri River, maintaining that their careful observations on the native species, landscapes, and human residents of that great stretch of country should serve as models for avoiding ``a glamorized utopian vision of nature.'' He covers the ground in a fashion, all right, but the framing device is contrived. Botkin writes with none of the luminousness of Lewis's journals (``Ocian in View!''), none of the sense of wonder at the vast new country the expedition saw. Instead, he offers sometimes sterile, sometimes contorted observations such as: ``Lewis and Clark, like modern rivermen, were confronted hour by hour, day by day, with the reality of a changing, unpredictable, and harsh nature. It is these rates of change and kinds of changes that must be our guide to finding solutions to environmental problems.'' Botkin's decision to cut his text into subheaded, scatterburst, short discussions yields an argument that flows as choppily as the lower Missouri. In that brisk seen-this-done-that approach, simple fact too often stands in the place of reasoned observation, and statements of the obvious are offered as profundities. Botkin does hit, now and again, on meaty matters, as when he observes that even as our cartographic techniques have grown ever more sophisticated, it is harder and harder to buy a US Geological Survey topographic map, and his longish discussion of salmon ecology is worthy of a book in itself. Botkin's forays, too, into the mismanagement of our national resources are well taken. But in the end there are too many asides here, and too little matter. (maps, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: May 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14048-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A look at the turns JFK's legacy has taken since his death, and at how his and brother Robert's ghosts have haunted both Republican and Democratic successors. Henggeler (History/Univ. of Texas, Pan American) expands here on his first book, In His Steps (1991), a study of the Kennedy mystique's effect on LBJ. Despite a mixed record as congressman and president, JFK soon came to signify an idealistic promise his successors couldn't hope to match, the author contends. His legacy has been pernicious, derailing three presidents and influencing every presidential campaign since Kennedy's death. Johnson suffered most—overshadowed despite his brilliant legislative accomplishments, vainly trying to appropriate the Kennedy energy and media adulation, eventually brought down by a military entanglement that his predecessor initiated. The presidents and presidential and vice-presidential aspirants who followed have genuflected before the Kennedy image while using the assassinated president for their own ends, but they've often misfired. Hengeller's account leaves us with comic, jarring images: a homely Johnson posing for GQ at his Texas ranch; a staged photo op with Nixon running on the beach—in hard shoes—while reporters mock him; Clinton's JFK handshake replayed, backwards and in slow motion, to enhance its effect on voters. We get hopefuls like Gary Hart being overly Kennedy-esque; Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK, to the derision of Lloyd Bentsen; and an all-too-human Ted out-Kennedy-ed by the more virtuous Jimmy Carter in 1979. Reservations: Hengeller's lack of respect for Hart and Michael Dukakis is poorly concealed; he runs hot, then cold on Clinton, hedging his bets; and he never satisfactorily identifies the reasons for the role Kennedy plays in public memory. Nonetheless, this meticulous and well-rendered treatise draws history onto important ground—tracking the influence of a single, powerful symbol in an age when political power came to reside increasingly in media spectacle.
Pub Date: April 14, 1995
ISBN: 1-56663-078-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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