A persuasive, entertaining argument about how our avid pursuit of deliciousness helped shape our evolutionary path.
A history of the influence of food and flavor on human evolution.
Dunn, a professor of applied ecology, and Sanchez, a medical anthropologist, ponder the role of deliciousness in the choices our ancestors made about food. The answers may seem obvious, but the authors reveal a deeper, broader story than many readers may expect. They note that while anthropologists and historians often talk about the diets and foods available to ancient peoples, seldom discussed is what their favorite foods might have been, what flavors enticed them, and why. Since the scientific literature has comparatively little to say about gastronomy, the authors speculate on the evolution of deliciousness in light of evolution, ecology, agriculture, and history. They also amplify their findings with considerations of neurobiology, physics, chemistry, and psychology. Our hosts at this empirical dinner party envision a new future for the study of flavor, with seats for the curious of every stripe. On the bill of fare is deliciousness in all its manifestations—not simply taste, but the entire sensory experience of eating: taste, aroma, texture, color. They also serve up theories on how early culinary traditions may have played a key role in the development of certain tools designed to make foods available, engendering further evolutionary changes, as well as considerations on how flavor and aroma seduce other species. In their view, food choice has been almost as much about pleasure as survival, and our ancestors set the table. Among the most interesting chapters is one that examines why humans began to use spices, likely as much for our primitive understanding of preservation (their ability to kill food pathogens) as for the novel flavors they imparted. On a darker note, Dunn and Sanchez investigate how, abetted by climate change, we have eaten many species to extinction. Their diligent research is evident in the 50 pages of notes.
A persuasive, entertaining argument about how our avid pursuit of deliciousness helped shape our evolutionary path.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-19947-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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