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BE MY GUEST

REFLECTIONS ON FOOD, COMMUNITY, AND THE MEANING OF GENEROSITY

Careful considerations of the wide world of food and “the life-play of hospitality.”

The roles food and hospitality play in a woman’s personal life and in the broader world.

“Who are we becoming? Who do we want to be?” asks Basil, the Berlin-based co-founder of Authors for Peace. “Can the answer lie in a sausage? Perhaps only insofar as one never exactly knows—or wants to!—all the contents within the casing. Identity, too, is a mince of sorts.” In these short and sometimes meandering musings, in which the author enlists the wisdom of Plato, Kant, Hannah Arendt, Peter Singer, and other thinkers, Basil explores what it means to be a woman, an immigrant, a host, and a guest through the backdrop of food, specifically the Indian food that reflects her Sikh background. Although born in London to Indian parents, Basil has also lived in Kenya, Britain, and Germany, giving her exposure to unique experiences that have shaped her ways of thinking about what it means to belong. Physical and emotional sustenance via food are the main themes that move through Basil’s ruminations about integration, hospitality, the necessity of the European Union, altruism, and her insecurities about her relationships with others and with food itself. She shares her obsession with her mother’s kadhi, a curry made with graham flour and yogurt, describes a langar (a free meal at a Sikh temple, regardless of the guest’s religion or ethnicity), and chronicles her difficulties in maintaining a healthy weight. Pungent details help bring readers into the moment—e.g., Basil’s observations of the variety of bare feet she encountered at the langar. The tone is conversational, but the author also touches on deep subjects such as racism, food waste, and how food can be healing, seductive, or even used as a weapon. Although a quick read, the book offers plenty of room for contemplation.

Careful considerations of the wide world of food and “the life-play of hospitality.”

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-0-525-65785-9

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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