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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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