Readers wishing for a little more about food and a little less about nationalism may want to look elsewhere, but Raviv...
What’s in a falafel? By the lights of food-studies and nutrition adjunct professor Raviv, it’s not just chickpeas and pita bread, but also identity.
You are what you eat. That’s true of nations as much as people, and that can be a problem if what you eat is what your neighbor eats—or, as the author writes, “Who has the right to falafel? Whose hummus is bigger?” As she shows, foods such as falafel and hummus, now mainstays of the Israeli diet—and, yes, of Israeli self-definition—owe to neighboring Arabic traditions and were absorbed into Israel’s cuisine through a process whereby, to put it one way, Europeans shed their European identities: “Israelis’ choice of falafel and hummus as markers of identity should perhaps be perceived as a reflection of their wish to become part of the Middle East.” Olives, oranges, and other foods underwent similar assimilation, even as Israelis began to incorporate elements from many places—immigrants from Russia, Italy, North Africa, and America. Though invested with many meanings, those foods became unifying symbols. Raviv traces this transformation over the course of more than a century, looking at such matters as the Zionist “homegrown” campaign of the 1920s and the use of the school cafeteria as a vehicle for the development of a national cuisine. The author is particularly good on pressing the point that such cuisines are seldom fixed but instead constantly adapt as new groups enter and as time changes. Naturally, such ideas of variability and contested meanings are couched in the language of postmodernism—e.g., “Because food is disarming, it does not read as a product of high culture”; “I, too, aim to use the concrete evidence of the development of a national cuisine to interrogate the abstraction of nationalism.”
Readers wishing for a little more about food and a little less about nationalism may want to look elsewhere, but Raviv delivers an academic yet mostly accessible work of culinary anthropology.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9017-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
