Book Description
Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., led a brief, intense life. Born in 1835 to a Boston family that for more than a century was a guiding force in the history of New England, Lowell died in 1864 at the battle of Cedar Creek, mortally wounded during the crucial Union victory there.
The Nature of Sacrifice offers a lively history of abolitionist Boston and of Lowell’s remarkable family there; his grandfathers were each larger-than-life figures who represented quintessential Yankee elements of business brilliance and spiritual energy. Lowells were at the heart of the American Anti-Slavery Society; Louis Kossuth came to call at the Lowells’ house; Longfellow and Emerson were family friends. But the unexpected bankruptcy of Charlie’s father altered the family’s fortunes, and before the son was out of Harvard, he had determined to redeem the family name.
After a bout with tuberculosis and a recuperative stay in Europe, Lowell turned to the business of making money. Soon after his return he went out West, involving himself in the vital new industry of railroading, until his career was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War.
The rich tapestry of Bundy’s narrative shows the many threads that made this war such a climactic experience for Charlie Lowell, whose family and circle had, after all, been instrumental in fashioning it into a war against slavery. And Bundy masterfully demonstrates how Lowell was transformed as he served on General McClellan’s staff, helped to form the fabled Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment of black volunteers (led by his cousin Robert Gould Shaw), fought Colonel Mosby’s guerrillas, and implemented Grant’s ruthless strategy in Virginia. Lowell’s years as a rising Union cavalry officer were shadowed by the battlefield deaths of his brother, cousins, and many friends. What were they dying for, and was the sacrifice worth it? For Lowell and his friends, a new concept of self-sacrifice evolved as they faced the horrors of war, and Lowell, who championed this principle in life, became in death his generation’s symbol of American idealism in action.
Customer Reviews:
'a child of the(19)sixties living in the 1850s and not the Brahmin snob that I thought I would encounter........2007-03-10
The Nature of Sacrifice: Charles Russell Lowell's Civil War
The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Rusell Lowell, Jr. 1835-1864, Carol Bundy, Farrer Strauss and Giroux, 560pp., endnotes, index, 2005, $35.00.
Within the first several chapters, this reader found Charlie Lowell a 'child of the(19)sixties living in the 1850s and not the Brahmin snob that he thought he would encounter.
Born in 1835, immediately before his family slipped from high social standing and wealth and into the 'poor cousins' category, Charlie the grew up in the 'high'culture' of Boston of close-knit kinship relations and opportunities.
With Transcendentalists and Abolitionists as neighbors and relatives, with books and debate as a part of family dinner discourse, and with newspapers and current bestsellers as a part of the table top literature of the household, Charlie grew into an apparently aimless but articulate Harvard student. Slight in build and height, surpassed all, after giving the commencement day address at Harvard in 1856, he took a manual laborers job on the Boston wharfs.
He approached manual labor and business in general with the soul of a philosopher and philanthropist. He was a subversive idealist in the workplace, a worker with a social conscience, and a son who wished to succeed where his father failed. Charlie chose the iron industry as his place in the world. By 1860, after an interlude in Europe recovering from tuberculosis, he was managing an iron foundry, west of Sharpsburg, Maryland. Voting Republican in the presidential election, he watched the secession crisis from western Maryland. The attack on Massachusetts troops by a Baltimore mob in the spring of 1861 brought him into the ranks of the Union army as a cavalry captain.
By 1863, after seeing action on the Peninsula and serving on McClellan's staff during the Sharpsburg campaign, Charlie Lowell commanded the 2nd Massachusetts cavalry in what he considered a 'backwater' assignment, Mosby's Confederacy. It was difficult and distastefull duty for him but one at which he excelled. Lowell collected near missed throughout the war; on the Peninsula he shook out his bedroll from behind his saddle and minie balls dropped out. At Antietam, he discovered his horse to be winded and removed the saddle and found the beast hit several times under it. As a colonel of a brigade during the 1864 Shenandoah campaign, he participated and rationalized the destruction of civilian farmsteads. He finally received a wound from a ball that clipped his elbow, traveled up his sleeve,crossed his shoulder, traveled down and cut a small portion of his spine. He died within 24 hours; he was survived by his wife whom he married in 1863 and was seven months pregnant.
The nature of Charles Russell Lowell's sacrifice was multi-faceted: the happy bachelor who left a wife and child, the workplace manager with a heart for the workers, sleight twenty-somenthing who had become a leader of cavalrymen, and the intellectual who became a anti-guerrilla fighter.
This biography surprises in many ways. Charlie Lowell is put in the context of a family on economic decline, of a social conscience within the environment of the empheral ideas of Transcendentalism, and of a top achieving Harvard student who condemns the college's curriculum of constant mind-numbing rote memorization. In 1861, few would have picked Charlie Lowell become a successful leader of cavalrymen. Appreciated by McClellan, Stanton, and Mosby, Lowell became a hero. The nature of Lowell's sacrifice was the loss of a future earned by a man who believed that there are no problems, only solutions and seized his duty to find a way to succeed.
harrowing, powerful, biography.......2006-04-01
Drawing her story from hundreds of family letters, Carol Bundy describes with vivid detail the life and death of Charles Russell Lowell. She is a fine writer, and this, her first book (amazingly), is a remarkable achievement. I found it totally absorbing. Yes, Bostonian readers especially will discover many familiar names, but Bundy's viewpoint is neither partisan nor provincial. I highly recommend this book as one of the best I've read in a long time. Just one caveat: it is very, very sad.
Reading these other two books enhances this book.......2006-01-16
This is a three way review, along the lines of "readers who enjoyed this book also enjoyed....." Each of these books enriches reading of the other two. They are, in order of publication (and the order in which I read them), The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand, The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl, and The Nature of Sacrifice, a biography of Charles Russell Lowell, by Carol Bundy; These three fit together like birds in an Escher sketch. The many other reviews of each of these three explore their focus, their scholarship, their pace, breadth and depth, skillful turn of phrase and weaving of ideas: all of them excel in every way that their respective genre demands. What has intrigued me is how each, from their own genre and viewpoint, contribute to a fuller picture of the ideas and times that the others explore and a more informative and enjoyable total reading experience.
Briefly, The Metaphysical Club is primarily about ideas, and secondarily about their men: Oliver Wendell Holmes; William James; Charles Peirce and John Dewey, but Menand also necessarily explores the milieu from which these men and their eyes emerged. Holmes and James received the lion's share of delving into their history, as I recall from my reading several years ago, principally their lives as sons in their natal families, and their experiences with the Civil War: Holmes' an intimate, lucky survivor's life emerging from the corpses of a great many of his boyhood and college chums, James', a more distant, detached view. Menand explores how these war time experiences, as well as their exposure to zealous causes, such as abolition and the copperhead reaction thereto, shaped their approaches to life, to dealing with ideas, with movements, how Holmes applied these ideas in his jurisprudence and James in his philosophies. The Metaphysical Club is dense, tersely but often breezily written, requiring frequent re-readings of paragraphs and sections. If you let your mind wander for a sentence, you must retreat and reread. Menand also follows their ideas into the twentieth century, and their effects on public and higher education and other important areas in our country. We learn quite a bit about Boston, Cambridge and New England.
The Dante Club is fiction, which takes place within the boundaries, both geographical and temporal, of the Metaphysical Club. The club members tickle but do not overlap with the Metaphysicals: O.W. Holmes' father, the "diminutive doctor," as famous in his day as his son came to be in his; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the key figure, then widowered, and bringing forth his English translation of Dante's Inferno, with the help of Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, poet, critic, and a founder of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, among other things, (including the uncle of Charles Russell Lowell, subject of the third book); and Charles Washington Green. The Dante Club is an exciting, interesting, chatty, rather informative and fast moving murder mystery, set mostly in Cambridge in the first few years after the Civil War had ended, partly in Boston, with forays to Boston's north shore, to civil war battle grounds south of the Mason Dixon line, and an occasional mention of Italy. Cameo appearances of Holmes Jr and his friends, his wounds and his ideas give hints of the developments of the Metaphysical Club, which was just then perhaps starting to take form. The Dante Club is a refreshingly easy reading barnstormer, a nice, light dessert after the Metaphysical Club. It inks a palpable picture of Cambridge after the civil war, and is great fun to read while sitting in a park along Brattle Street. J. R. Lowell enjoys a large role in it, and to understand its mystery, and the resolution thereof, it is helpful to know something of the lives, privations and crises of the everyday civil war soldier, and his officers. This then brings us to the missing piece in the puzzle, The Nature of Sacrifice.
The Nature of Sacrifice is Bundy's first published book, as the Dante Club is Pearl's. (Menand has several books to his credit, but he is mostly known for his remarkably wide ranging articles, essays and other short pieces that have established him as one of today's leading public intellectuals.) Bundy's biography of Charles Russell Lowell, J. R. Lowell's nephew and sometimes housemate, uncannily fills in territory left open by both these books about non-existent clubs, almost as if her book were written just for me, so that I could enjoy the other two more. Bundy's book is at once more compact, more potent than both, because her subject died before his 30th year, and also because he was a real live hero. She writes of the sounds, smells and sights of soldiering and battle with such vigor, organization and thrust that images and whole scenes arise in the mind's eye, as well as the mind's ear, and the mind's nostrils. Bundy's prose soars and charges, leaving the reader with no doubt that it tells the story of a flesh and blood man who lived earnestly, and died violently, leaving a family and community eviscerated by his death; and not only his death. Portrayal of His death stands as the synechdoche, the one death, put before us to call forth every single death in every family that lost a son to the Civil War adding up to the over 600,000 civil war deaths, and with just a little imagination, to all deaths, in all wars. Bundy gives us the catalogue of Boston and Cambridge families who sent their treasure to war, and lost that treasure, their individual names, their beautiful faces, the faces of their sisters, their playmates, the lists of places where they died, the lists of names who died in the same battles, or the same years; families with two sons dead (as was the case for the Lowells); She depicts the normal, daily childhood these boys led before they went off as men to kill and be killed. Bundy provides the real raw material for Holmes' pragmatic views, and James' different pragmatic views, for the motivations behind the actions of the main characters in the Dante Club, a picture of Dante's Hell, as well as really helping the reader to understand the insanity of the action in the Dante Club as something other than insanity, rather as a reaction to civil insanity that is beyond sane and insane, beyond good and evil as opposites. Bundy's descriptions also of the social and political background of the Civil War is very helpful to understand that war at at least a casual level. It certainly isn't and doesn't try to be an in depth study of those backgrounds, which studies have been done again and again. But it helped to get a picture of the country before the Civil war on many levels. Bundy's book is also a real counterweight to the other two, because much of the story is gleaned from sources written by or to women: Lowell's mother, his sister, his wife, wives of his comrades. Not to be simplistic, but mothers and sisters do have different views about war, risk and death than do most men.
These 3 books also reinforce each other, because they feel to be pieces of the same cloth. Nothing, or hardly anything in either of them contradicts matters in another, or jars the sense of the places and times established by the others.
So, I heartily recommend all three of these books to anyone interested in any one of them. And, I think that reading in the order of publication, or probably even better, its reverse, is the way to go, keeping Dante in the middle as a quick, driving light weight, between the two much more serious, albeit compelling and exciting non-fictions.
Death Stains Cedar Creek.......2005-10-23
I first became interested in the career of Charles Russell Lowell Jr., when earlier this spring I saw the author, Carol Bundy, speak about him and read from her book on TV, on a fourm provided by the Public TV station Boston's WGBH. For this reader Boston visits always include at least a few hours spent curled up in front of a high-definition TV and turning on the public station, for it seems nowhere else in the country do the arts get such play. Nor the humanities, including the utterly humane biography that Bundy has written of a man she says is her great-great-great-great uncle I think. She was amazed when, after her grandmother died, among her trunks and effects out tumbled the clattering sword of Lowell, as well as his dress uniform, preserved through generations who had relished remembering him as their fallen hero.
As though honoring this family mandate, Bundy has done her level best to help preserve his memory for at least another generation. For on the one hand although Lowell was a forgotten soldier, dead before he was thirty, he fought with distinction at a number of pivotal sites in the War Between the States, at one point serving with "Mosby's Marauders." He was a curious chap, as Bundy relates. While his peers and elders were romantic dreamers-transcendentalists, really-who swore by the abolitionist movement and excused the barbarities of some of its activists as examples of ends justfying means, Lowell took the middle ground, sort of turning his nose up at the ideals in question, while cherishing a different set of ideals, by and large culled from a classical education and a tour of Europe on the grand scale. On this extended sojourn, the privilege of young gentlemen of the 19th century, Lowell became haunted by Michelangelo's painting of the three fates. Later on in the annals of art scholarship, ironically enough, it emerged that the painting was not by Michelangelo at all-not even close. But such is its power that it made Lowell sort of an ironist, and a fatalist too.
Bundy brings the War alive as Shelby Foote did, though from the union side of course. The sights and sounds of the battlefield waft over the reader who dares finish this exhsuaring biography all the way through, not only the sounds of glory but the rotting flesh of the dead and the mad faces of the survivors. Like Shakespeare, Lowell begs the question. No wonder his funeral was attended by so many notables, still spooked by him, for none could follow the oddments and the contours of his soul. Today his distinguished descendant has widened the field of inquiry, allowing us to see the lineaments of a brief life with tantalizing hesitance.
Well written but too many factual errors.......2005-09-23
Ms. Bundy paints an exceptionally fine picture of the Boston cultural and political scene in the pre-war years. She clearly knows the Lowell family's story (she's a descendent) and she also is a good writer.
However, when she gets away from that and into the details of the war, she falls very short. Her information on Ball's Bluff, for example, contains several errors. Capt. Caspar Crowninshield did not command the 20th Massachusetts and was not the only officer from that regiment to make it back from Ball's Bluff.
On three occasions, she describes California governor Leland Stanford as a "copperhead" or a southern sympathizer though Stanford helped found the Republican party in California and was an ardent Unionist.
She notes Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts as Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, though Wilson was not even a member of that committee.
She treats the tactic of fighting cavalry dismounted almost as if it were invented by Col. Lowell instead of being an old and well-known dragoon technique.
There are numerous other small mistakes like that which some fact-checking or a little more research would have let her avoid. I give the book three stars instead of two only because it is very well written and because the mistakes she makes are not central to the story she is trying to tell about Lowell. They are very jarring, however, and the reader should be prepared for them.
Average customer rating:
- Strongly recommended and powerfully vivid
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Gideon Lincecum's Sword: Civil War Letters from the Texas Home Front
Gideon Lincecum
Manufacturer: University of North Texas Press
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Customer Reviews:
Strongly recommended and powerfully vivid.......2001-04-15
The effects of the Civil War on Civilian life in Texas are powerfully conveyed in the correspondence of Dr. Gideon Lincecum (1793-1874), a natural scientist and philosopher who moved to Texas in 1848 with his family of ten children and settled in Washington County. This body of correspondence, ably edited by the collaborative efforts of Jerry Bryan Lincecum, Edward hake Phillips, and Peggy A. Redshaw, is gathered together in Gideon Lincecum's Sword: Civil War Letters From The Texas Home Front and forms a strongly recommended, powerfully vivid, and informatively welcome addition to Civil War studies reference collections and reading lists.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on November 1, 2002. The length of the article is 497 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Gideon Lincecum's Sword: Civil War Letters from the Texas Home Front.(Book Review)
Author: Sylvia W. McGrath
Publication:
Journal of Southern History (Refereed)
Date: November 1, 2002
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 68
Issue: 4
Page: 975(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
Dr. Peter J. D'Adamo has forever changed the strategy for eating right to lose weight and achieving maximum health. Because he discovered what many already instinctively knew-that a plan that works for one person may make another ill-there will never be a one-size-fits-all diet again. And since we now know that each blood type is affected differently by common diseases and conditions, there will never be a one-size-fits-all plan of action.
With more than 2 million copies of his books in print, G. P. Putnam's Sons announces the launch of Dr. D'Adamo's Eat Right 4 (for) Your Type Library. Over the next two years, eight books will be published on eight different conditions, the first two being cancer and diabetes. In these books, readers will find new information individualized for their blood type and illness. In addition to the food categories Beneficial, Neutral, and Avoid, Dr. D'Adamo introduces a new category-Superbeneficial-for helping your body fight disease. He also introduces self-assessment tests to determine status and measure progress. Supplement, lifestyle, and exercise protocols are tailored to each blood type and condition. There has never been a better arsenal for fighting disease, and never an easier or clearer tool.
Customer Reviews:
Would you like to live a sweet life?.......2006-11-18
This is an EXCELLENT book! I have had type 1 diabetes for over 25 years
(no complications) and I follow the Blood Type O Program. I have been
following this for many years but now I have Dr. Peter D'Adamo
backing me up. I highly recommend this book for everyone.
Remember, "Diabetes Can Be Sweet...Once You BURY It."
help please--.......2006-09-04
glad to talk to you--finally--
never did get the book!
post office says they don't know anything about the tracing number and that I need to be in touch with you. will you please see about getting the book to me? Thanks a lot.
At Long Last!.......2005-10-02
As someone who's done the fad dieting thing & failed, it's nice to find something that recognizes the different physical needs & make-up of each person. I highly recommend The Blood Type Diet for anyone who wants to get off the merry-go-round.
An excellent resourse for living better.......2004-07-28
My family has a history of type 2 diabetes, so I wanted to know how to avoid becoming a diabetic. This book in addition to the other books especially Live Right 4 Your Type have been excellent resources to help me understand my genetic hertitage. I am an O blood type, secretor. I am amazed at how much more energetic and powerful I feel now that I have been utilizing the diet for a year now. I rarely feel fatigued now. I have increased muscle mass. Best of all, now that I have eliminated wheat products, dairy and corn from my diet, I do not have anymore cramping/pain in my colon.
I know that avoiding the 'avoid foods' is difficult. It was for me too; I had been eating a goblet of ice cream every night before going to bed and I loved OREO cookies. As we get older (I'm 40 now) however we need to leave such childish eating behavior behind us if we want to be healthy and this book is the best resource I have read to date. If you are overweight and/or diabetic and you want take eating action to solve your health condition this book is a start. I also would highly recomend working with a doctor who is IjHI (Institute for Human Individuality) Certified. These doctors specialize in treating diabetes and other preventable health conditions with this diet. These doctors are not cheap but worth every penny if you value your health. Doctors not certified are simply unaware of treatments that can solve someones diabetic condition, so they prescribe what they know short term solutions (drugs).
I love being in control of my health, my kids do too. It's not easy or cheap, but it's worth it. If you solve the problem, you live life with joy; If treat the symptoms only, you live life with agony.
How to Take Control of Your Health/Eat For Your Blood Type.......2004-05-21
I found this book to be most informative and helpful in the successful management of elevated blood sugar levels, triglycerides and body fat. This book allowed me to eliminate foods from my diet that are triggers for insuline production for my blood type, and allowed me to take control of my diet. This book very matter of factly lists foods that are beneficial to your blood type and those that are harmful. Each food group is broken down into five categories, from "very beneficial" to "avoid" for literally hundreds of foods. As I began to eliminate foods that are in the avoid column, I immediately noticed a difference in my energy level, and overall well being. It was a dramatic change for me, and the side benefit is the loss of eleven pounds in three weeks, better sleep patterns, loss of cravings, and an overall feeling of renewed health.
I recommend this book to anyone that has been diagnosed with early stages of Type 2 Diabetes, or is pre-diabetic. Following the recommendations in this book will help you to take control of you health, and create lifestyle changes that will benefit you long into the future.
Amazon.com
The table of contents of The Essential Mediterranean is the first hint that author Nancy Harmon Jenkins is about to reveal to the reader a Mediterranean most never see or know. "Salt." That's the first chapter, followed by "Olives and Olive Oil," "Wheat," "Pasta and Couscous," "Wine," "The Oldest Legumes," "Peppers and Tomatoes," "The Family Pig," "The Sea," and "From the Pasture." This is a reader's book. Jenkins writes her way into the heart of the region, its history, its food, its people with a level of prose and insight rarely encountered in food writing. But she's also a wonderful cook. So these chapters are followed by two appendices that explain basic technique and food sources, because The Essential Mediterranean is also a cook's book.
"Food," Jenkins writes, "is present in Mediterranean cultures in a way it's not in our own ... the way it's grown and harvested, the way it's prepared, what's in season and out...." The Essential Mediterranean brings that same sensibility, or at least its potential, into the North American kitchen and home. These are fabulous flavors, she reminds the reader, simple foods, with health benefits suited to life in a spa. And, they are easy to include in our daily fare. It's a matter of understanding the key ingredients, as though they are building blocks. "A recipe," Jenkins notes, "is a formula.... Cooking, on the other hand, is a strategy...." This is a book to read, and then to taste, with dozens of classic, delicious recipes. By the time you finish The Essential Mediterranean, you will not only be a better Mediterranean cook, you will know why. --Schuyler Ingle
Book Description
With The Essential Mediterranean, Nancy Harmon Jenkins continues her lifelong exploration of Mediterranean food -- how it is grown, prepared, and shared around the table. In her latest book, Ms. Jenkins introduces cooks and readers to a cluster of core ingredients and foodways that are fundamental to all of the Mediterranean's diverse cuisines. She shows how the Mediterranean attitude toward food -- a combination of respect, integrity, enthusiasm, and sheer joy -- can be cultivated across the Atlantic.
In twelve informative and captivating chapters, the author focuses on the core ingredients common to the diverse cuisines of the region: salt, wine and vinegar, pasta and couscous, bread, olive oil, Old World legumes, New World peppers and tomatoes, dairy products, the family pig, and the resources of the sea. In each chapter she travels to a different corner of the Inner Sea to describe how and why these essential ingredients are obtained, what determines their quality, and where they fit in local cuisines.
Each chapter draws on history and ethnography as much as on the lives of Mediterranean people today. Readers will delight in Majid Mahjoub, the colorful Tunisian "Shakespeare of olive oil," and commiserate with Provencal cheese maker Yves van Weddingen as he struggles to maintain his standards in the face of bureaucratic demands. Home cooks will garner a new appreciation of high-quality Spanish jamon de bellota as they follow the Trigo family through the annual winter ritual of transforming the family pig into hams and sausages.
More than 170 contemporary, accessible recipes, simple to reproduce at home, bring the foods and the regions alive, while additional chapters include basic procedures and staples, as well as a helpful guide to ingredient sources.
The Essential Mediterranean gets to the heart of this world, celebrating its diverse food cultures and the shared ingredients that are the essence of these remarkable cuisines.
Customer Reviews:
I only care about the recipes, and these are good........2004-07-23
I have a book on Moroccan cooking by Paula Wolfert and a book on Syrian cooking, and both are daunting to me because of the techniques and equipment required. I consider this book as a bridge into understanding how to cook Mediterranean food. It has the best tabouleh recipe of all time. I look forward to using this as a primer and a reference. From this book I will gain the familiarity with the food in order to cook it well.
Deep Analysis and History of Mediterranean Cuisine.......2004-03-25
Nancy Harmon Jenkins clearly belongs to the elite cadre of culinary writers who interpret Mediterranean cuisine for us. Foremost among these are Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Paula Wolfert, and Clifford Wright. And that doesn't include the many writers specializing in particular countries, such as Penelope Casas on Spain, Diane Kochilas on Greece, and Patricia Wells on France.
Each of these writers gives us a slightly different perspective on the same subject, so they rarely overlap in their general essays on the Mediterranean. Roden is the historian, Wolfert is the ethnologist, and Wright is the taxonomist. Jenkins' role seems to be the dietitian and synthesist, explaining what it is that makes Mediterranean cuisine distinctive and, in other works, what makes it as healthy as it appears in demographic studies of peoples and diets.
Of all the works I have read by these authors, this book is the most interesting to people interested in history and current events, but with only an average interest in cooking. The primary object of the book is to identify those foodstuffs that are central to the Mediterranean diet, and how they achieved that status. The main characters in this story are salt, olives, wheat and its products, wine and vinegar, legumes, peppers (chiles), tomatoes, pork, seafood, and milk (giving cheese and yogurt).
The first item, salt, may seem unexciting since every culture has used and valued salt. But, salt has played a larger role in Mediterranean history than in other cultures because the Mediterranean Sea happens to be a lot saltier than the broader `seven seas'. This means that it is a lot easier to harvest sea salt, which means that salt preserved foods become much more common. A perfect example of how simple things can make enormous differences.
Olives and olive oil are a no-brainer and anyone who has read at any length on Mediterranean food will not find a lot of new information here. The chapter on wheat was a major surprise on at least two counts. The first was biological. I knew there was a significant difference between durum wheat and other wheats, but I had no idea the difference was at such a deep genetic level and that durum wheat represents less than 10% of world wheat crops. The second surprise was historical. I am well aware of the difference between soft and hard pastas from the north and south of Italy respectively, but I had no idea that hard pasta (macaroni) was almost entirely limited in its production and distribution to southern Italy until after the end of World War II. This makes it clear that as important as bread is today as a Mediterranean starch, it once was much more important in Italy.
Almost every chapter had its little surprises. While I was skimming my way through the chapter on Old World beans, I was surprised by the discovery that there is a significant genetically based allergy to fava beans and that none other than Pythagoras banned their consumption. This may only be exciting to an avid reader of history and philosophy, but it certainly puts a new twist on how I think about fava beans the next time Mario Batali breaks them out on `Molto Mario'.
The list goes on. This book clearly fills a void in food writing by clearly defining a subject people often talk about without being really clear about their subject. As a result of the nutritional findings cited earlier, it becomes pretty important to know what it is that makes all those southern Italians so healthy.
One concern is that most of the book deals with Italy, southern France, and Spain. The author even concedes this point at the beginning, with the totally understandable statement that she is dealing with what she knows. On the other side of the coin, the range of the author's sources is very broad, including source material from many historical documents on peasant life in the Mediterranean in the last thousand years.
In addition to the essays on foodstuffs, the book offers recipes featuring each item. All are worthy, but the real value to the book is in the essays. That being said, I was really disappointed to find that although the book had a very good bibliography, there were references to authorities' names with no mention of them in the bibliography. The chapter on legumes for example refers to the anthropologist Sidney Mintz, yet no work by Mr. (Dr.?) Mintz appears in the bibliography. Not good reflections on Harper Collins' copy editors.
This is a small annoyance. Overall, the book gives a fresh, insightful view of Mediterranean cuisine. Almost all the recipes are classics, with relatively simple, straightforward instructions. Maybe not as authentic as Paula Wolfert, but definitely more authentic than Good Housekeeping.
Highly recommended for any foodie or even for History buffs.
What a beautiful book!.......2003-08-28
To call this book a "cookbook" is really an understatment- it's an indulgence in the ways of the Mediterranean lifestyle. The delicious recipes are an added bonus. Learn all about the best olive oil to buy, how it's processed, and read Jenkins' interview with an expert on the subject. This is also one of the most beautiful cookbooks I've owned. If you love Mediterranean food and want to know more about the tradtions and history behind it, this is the best book! Makes an impressive gift.
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- The Sea-Hawk
- The Spy Wore Red: My Adventures as as Undercover Agent in World War II
- The Terror of Tobermory
- The Things I Want Most: The Extraordinary Story of a Boy's Journey to a Family of His Own
- The White-Haired Girl: Bittersweet Adventures of a Little Red Soldier
- Then I Came Home
- THIRD REICH CLOTH INSIGNIA: Service Badges and Emblems
- U.S. Master Estate and Gift Tax Guide (2006)
- Under Fire: An American Story/Cassettes
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
- The Pastry Queen: Royally Good Recipes from the Texas Hill Country's Rather Sweet Bakery & Cafe
- La generalización del "efecto tango": la crisis de Argentina empieza a golpear a sus vecinos
- Medicinal Plants and Their History
- Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation
- The Shakespeare Stealer
- The Cat Notebook: Being an Illustrated Book With Quotes
- Ten Thick Inches: Erotic Short Stories
- More Debits Than Credits: The Burnt Investor's Guide to Financial Statements
- The Christmas Thief: A Novel
Harvard's Civil War: The History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May-June 1864
Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Civil War America)
To The Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
