Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“I Like Food, Food Tastes Good,’ (is) a compendium of recipes submitted by the likes of Mick Cooke from Belle and Sebastian, Sam Fogarino of Interpol, and RJ “RJD2? Krohn. The book takes its title from a Descendents song, and it approaches its topic matter with a similarly unpretentious aura of nonchalant cool.’ Read the [...]

“Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (is) a British food celebrity. He is forty-two, principally a journalist and television host by trade, who wears inexpensive horn-rimmed glasses so familiar to his British audience that they are now a piece of instant anti-branding branding. The look, like his dress (muddy Wellington boots, soiled linen jacket, the mess of the occasional [...]

“(Since Kate) Colquhoun is a writer of lively detail rather than argument - you might say her book is too busy stuffing its face, one course after another, to pause for conversation - the question of why Britain developed such a poor cuisine is never fully addressed.’ Read the review at the International Herald Tribune.

“Without her we wouldn’t have Rachel Ray, Nigella Lawson, or the Jamie Oliver. We wouldn’t have the French cooking bible, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Without her, Bon Appetite would not be in the pop culture lexicon. My Life in France tells the story of how the inspiration epicure, Julia Child, was born.’ Read [...]

“In his eccentric and often affecting memoir “Tastes Like Cuba,” Machado, a noted Cuban-American playwright, tells the story of his rootless, self-invented life, using food as his connecting thread. After his grandfather boasts that his arroz con pollo “will taste just like Cuba,” Machado thinks: “How do you make a meal taste like a place? [...]

“Don’t be surprised if you’re feeling queasy after reading Frederick Kaufman’s brief but comprehensive examination of our collective guts. The glut of information within—and what it all means to (and for) America—is enough to make even the strongest stomach turn.As a country, we are preoccupied with food. Hundreds of diet books line shelves, while the [...]

“The comics collected in this book range fairly far and wide, but the strong center of gravity is plaintive tales of everyday life, set in the present, and usually about the social groups that comic artists themselves belong to. The appeal of such work is its emotional directness - in this age of highly branded, [...]

“It lurks in the background of our childhood imagination, now and again roaring back in adulthood to remind us of possibilities. A map of the world, that fixture in elementary classrooms, has always been a book masquerading as a flat piece of paper. Like layers of the earth for geologists, maps offer a glinting sample [...]

“Dean Wareham was the guitarist for Galaxie 500, a much-loved indie trio whose droning atmospherics and oblique lyrics owed as much to Dadaist prose as they did to the Velvet Underground. The indie-rock world of the late ’80s and early ’90s now seems as distant as only the recent past can. Wareham’s memoir of the [...]

“Masumoto is an American farmer whose family arrived from Japan in 1898 and today embodies a century long history of farming “the other California,” the agriculturally rich Central Valley . . . As literary essays, Masumoto’s letters are occasionally uneven. His unwavering adherence to the letter format sometimes adds an “aw, shucks” clumsiness, especially in [...]

“In 1949, Noël Coward wrote to his childhood friend Esme Wynne, who was trying to get him to find God: “My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noël [...]

“Generations from now, what will your personal writings reveal about you and the time in which you lived? Would you want them preserved, or destroyed? Former first lady Martha Washington destroyed most of her letters from George. Mother Teresa had not wanted her letters to see daylight. Fortunately, the illustrious Adams family of Massachusetts has [...]

“Richard Greene (no relation), a professor of English at the University of Toronto, has edited a collection of Graham Greene’s letters. The novelist once estimated that he wrote 2000 letters a year, and he lived to be 86: publishing all those letters would have taken decades. The editor has sifted through Greene’s correspondence and come [...]

“The superbly edited and extraordinarily modestly priced Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron is an invaluable resource with which to find out exactly how a promising early nineteenth-century author was marketed and promoted by his entrepreneurial young publisher, and how this most competitive of writers, in turn, kept his finger on the literary pulse.” [...]

“Aldous Huxley and Maria Nys met at Garsington in 1916. He was in his early twenties, she still in her teens. She was exceptionally attractive – as her photographs show. They married in 1918 and lived together happily and more or less inseparably until her death in 1955. That event is recorded with a mixture [...]

“On Aug. 11, 1941, as massed German armies were advancing on Moscow, Colonel-General Franz Halder, chief of the Nazi general staff, wrote in his diary that “we have underestimated the Soviet colossus.” Since the German invasion had begun, some seven weeks before, the unprepared Soviets had been steadily pushed back toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, [...]

“Amazon.com lists more than 36,000 books on the American Civil War, and my guess is that most of them depict battles and heroes, and describe wartime deaths as noble and tragic. Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering” does something different. It’s a shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dying — [...]

“Sometimes you see it said in a fiction review that the geographical setting is as much of a character in the novel as, well, the characters. It seems this observation can be extended to nonfiction, as well, for in James Campbell’s superb “The Ghost Mountain Boys,” the island of New Guinea is one of the [...]

“In his “New History,” Barry Strauss tells the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning. Paris, the “cosmopolitan prince” from Troy, abducted the unhappy Helen in Sparta, not for love but for political reasons. Strauss sees the adulterous couple as “less like Romeo and Juliet than Juan and Eva Péron.” Helen escaped Sparta, [...]

“John Ferling toiled for years in relative obscurity at West Georgia University, churning out at least nine books, dozens of articles, and uncounted reviews, almost all dealing with war and politics in eighteenth-century America, the same subjects that have brought fame and riches to Joseph Ellis, David Hackett Fischer, and David McCullough. His prose may [...]

“John Rawls’s “Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy,” edited by Barbara Herman, was published in 2000 by Harvard University Press. Rawls there discusses the moral philosophies of Hume, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. In the “Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy” . . . he covers Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Marx, [...]

“The authors collected in “Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine,” all like (David) Hume great champions of self-improvement, address themselves to questions of subjectivity and taste, quantifiability and pleasure, perception and its objects, the role of knowledge and judgement in perceptual discernment, and the possibility of expertise in the arena of fine wine. They [...]

“John Hare writes that the purpose of God and Morality “is to look at the role theology, or thinking about God, has played in ethical theory within Western philosophy.” To carry out this purpose, he examines the ethical thought of four philosophers from four different eras: Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, and R. M. Hare. Structuring [...]

“What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being’ is the first book-length contribution to contemporary ethical theory by this highly regarded scholar of ancient philosophy. With it, Richard Kraut joins recent moral philosophers who draw inspiration from ancient Greek philosophy, particularly that of Plato and Aristotle, to advance lines of thinking that challenge utilitarianism [...]

“I hate the middle class. I am a snob and an ingrate, an erudite ignoramus unappreciative of the market that puts food on my table and books on my shelves. I and my left-wing ilk are responsible for at least one global war, the persistence of poverty and despair among the wretched of the earth, [...]

“What philosophers (have not done), until recently, is take an interest in empirical research about our responses to these or other dilemmas. Now, as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah describes in his concise yet erudite and engagingly written new book, “Experiments in Ethics,” this is changing.” Read the review at the New York Sun.

“Philosophers may lead us in terms of profound ideas, but their personal lives can be quite another matter entirely. As historian Nigel Rodgers and philosopher Mel Thompson write in their marvelous little book, Philosophers Behaving Badly, “a life of reason does not necessarily lead to a reasonable life.” Their portraits of eight philosophers bring home [...]