Harris folds into her batter so many weighty ingredients that it fails to rise.
A loosey-goosey historical odyssey of African-American cuisine, from the slave trade to celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson.
Renowned cookbook author Harris (English/Queens College; The Martha’s Vineyard Table, 2007, etc.) bites off more than she can chew here. The attempt to blend culinary history with the history of Africans in America—and with some memoir, as well—requires more than the brief, superficial rehash she provides. Even her longish section on Harlem seems like a snack—especially compared to Jonathan Gill’s massive Harlem (2011)—and she offers an almost romantic view of Africans and American Indians first greeting one another as kinsmen. Of enduring interest, though, are her observations about the alterations in the American diet wrought first by the slaves and then by subsequent generations of their descendants. Because many slaves worked in food preparation—and, following emancipation, in food-service professions—the African influence, she shows, has been pervasive. She emphasizes the prominence in the earlier African-American diet of pork, greens, melon, chicken, corn and other staples. “Food,” she writes, “provided a path to independence for many blacks, especially in the port towns on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.” Harris identifies a number of prominent blacks in American culinary history, including Hercules (George Washington’s cook), Robert Bogle, Peter Augustin, Mary Ellen Pleasant, Lena Richard, Freda DeKnight and Patrick Clark, who died on fame’s cusp at 42. Even more engaging are the snippets of her own biography, a much longer version of which could have provided a far more effective vehicle to carry her culinary comments, and she does not always get the details right (she attributes to Hawthorne the opening lines of Longfellow’s “Evangeline”). Includes 15 pages of recipes, from pigs’ feet to collard greens to a recipe called “snow eggs,” which may have come from Thomas Jefferson’s cook, James Hemings, brother of Sally.
Harris folds into her batter so many weighty ingredients that it fails to rise.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59691-395-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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