A well-researched study of Chinese-American food, the people who brought it to our neighborhoods and how Americans grew to...
Chen (History/Univ. of California, Irvine; Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community, 2000) shows how enterprising immigrants turned Chinese food, reviled by 19th-century Americans, into one of the country’s favorite ethnic meals.
Although there are a few recipes included, the book is more a socioeconomic/cultural study than a culinary one. The author, who grew up in China and came to America in the mid-1980s, shows how the intersection of Chinese immigration and America’s habits of consumption incubated a thriving restaurant culture. When Chinese men came without their families to seek their fortunes during the mid-19th-century gold rush, they faced racism and isolation. Driven out of mining and railroad jobs by hostile white workers, many became cooks and servants. Paradoxically, white middle-class families sought Chinese domestic workers for their work ethic, reliability and loyalty. Even low-income households could afford a Chinese servant, who learned to cook American fare, relieving the housewife of kitchen duties. Ostracized by white society, Chinese men lived in enclaves, forerunners of Chinatowns in large cities, and restaurants emerged to serve these communities and others on the margins of society. With cheap, plentiful, good food, these establishments “played a vital role in the democratization of consumption,” making eating out an affordable experience for all. In one of the most arresting sections of the book, Chen explains the unique social history connecting Chinese food and African-American and Jewish cultures. The author’s prose style is more slow cooking than spicy stir-fry, but his passion for the subject carries readers through the dry spots. Dipping into culinary concerns with chapters on “authentic” Chinese cuisine and cookbooks, he also delivers a perceptive view of an America built on abundance and consumption.
A well-researched study of Chinese-American food, the people who brought it to our neighborhoods and how Americans grew to love it.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0231168922
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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