A highly readable, well-researched narrative chronicling America’s boring culinary past and the one man who altered its...
Taking on the subject of another giant in the food world, McNamee (Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, 2008, etc.) traces the life of the fascinating and troubled man who transformed America’s bleak culinary landscape into the lush food environment of today.
In a media world jammed with TV shows featuring celebrity chefs, thousands of cookbooks, food blogs, specialty stores devoted to kitchen tools and ubiquitous online restaurant reviews, it is hard to perceive what passed for cuisine in 1950s America. Home cooking was belittled as drudgery, and the country lacked great cooking schools like those in Europe. Food criticism as a profession didn’t exist, and the new TV culture hailed frozen foods as the next great leap forward for homemakers. Craig Claiborne (1920–2000) grew up steeped in the succulent flavors of the Mississippi Delta, and he attended a leading hotel school in Switzerland, where he absorbed the techniques of classical French cooking and formal service. He became the food editor for the New York Times in1957, beginning a reasoned critique of New York’s restaurant scene and the lackluster culture of American food. “Henceforward, and with steadily increasing force,” writes McNamee, “he would become America’s leading authority on food. A good review from Craig Claiborne would have a restaurant’s telephones ringing day and night; a bad one would silence them.” For the next 30 years, Claiborne was the emperor of food, writing hundreds of food columns and publishing more than 20 books. He explored exotic locations and their cuisines and introduced a rainbow of new ingredients and flavors to America’s kitchens. He also launched the careers of numerous culinary personalities, including Marcella Hazan and Diana Kennedy, and he elevated home cooking into a joyful experience. McNamee deftly explores the glittering public life and far-reaching contributions Claiborne made to America’s food culture, as well as his troubled personal life.
A highly readable, well-researched narrative chronicling America’s boring culinary past and the one man who altered its course forever.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9150-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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