The strenuously chipper tone grates, but it makes a refreshing change from the overseriousness of some restaurant critics.
A chatty, episodic history of eating out from British food writer Sitwell.
Ranging from the Roman Empire to “The Future of Eating Out,” the author, food critic for the Telegraph, favors an anecdotal approach that should please readers of A History of Food in 100 Recipes. Sitwell’s preference for good stories over coherent narrative is evident in early chapters on the Ottoman Empire and legendary Moroccan globe-trotter Ibn Battuta, which don’t describe anything modern diners would think of as restaurants. An interesting chapter about medieval England, where food stalls in busy markets moved indoors to become cook shops and eventually sit-down restaurants, is followed by “The Coffee House Revolution,” more focused on socializing and talking politics than eating. Sitwell gets back to restaurants with “The French Revolution,” which reveals that Paris became a hotbed of fine dining because private chefs for the aristocracy opened restaurants there after their masters lost their heads during the Reign of Terror. From “the first modern-day celebrity chef” (Marie-Antoine Carême) on, the author trots through material familiar to historically minded foodies: the impact of the gas stove, the ghastliness of postwar British dining; the 1967 arrival in London of authentic French cuisine at Le Gavroche, which fueled a subsequent explosion in great British cooking by chefs trained there; the fresh, locally sourced revolution led by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in San Francisco; the outsize influence of restaurant guides; and the controversial rise of molecular gastronomy. Sitwell seasons the narrative with some intriguingly offbeat fare: the transition of Britannia & Co. in Bombay from dishing out comfort food to British imperialists to serving Parsi delicacies to Indians; the question of “the cultural appropriation of food” as embodied in a taco-frying machine patented by a Mexican immigrant and carried to global domination by Taco Bell; the conveyer belt in a crowded Japanese restaurant that ultimately moved sushi around the world and spawned the ecological catastrophe of industrial fishing.
The strenuously chipper tone grates, but it makes a refreshing change from the overseriousness of some restaurant critics.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63576-699-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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 Yorkerstaff 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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