Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love

I had already pretty much decided that I simply could not stomach the author, but when, in the last chapter, I read the words, “…remembering who I am and what I deserve,” my antipathy nearly boiled over.

It’s a shame, really, when authors insert so much of themselves directly into their work, because it becomes challenging to separate the author (whom, as you likely gathered from my opening sentence, I did not like) from the work, which is certainly not bad. Bread, Wine, Chocolate is a bit of The Food of a Younger Land meets Sugar, Salt, Fat, with a bit of Let Them Eat Shrimp thrown in for good measure.

Sethi has traveled the globe uncovering the origins of chocolate, wine, bread, beer, and coffee, and more importantly understanding why the varieties of these products is diminishing. The work is informative and well-informed; in the same way that Let Them Eat Shrimp caused me to think twice about the seafood I eat, Bread, Wine, Chocolate has me ruminating over the origins of my flour, in particular, to say nothing of my chocolate. I enjoyed, too, the aspect of travelogue that Sethi has created: from Ecuador to Ethiopia and England to India, she has captured glimpses of what makes places and flavors unique.

In the end, though, I just couldn’t get past too much of the author too much of the time. I didn’t choose Bread, Wine, Chocolate for its memoir aspect, and while the tone generally veered away from the preachy, I almost choked on the last line, “This is a book about food, but it’s really a book about life.” Bolded, no less. And that’s ultimately the issue for me – I wanted a book about food, but too often Sethi stopped to write about her life.

Two stars.

The Shore

Generations of deadbeats, derelicts, and druggies. As best I can tell that sums up Sara Taylor's The Shore. Of course, I only made it two-thirds of the way through before deciding I could not devote any more of my life to this book. I picked it up because of its setting on the outer islands of Virginia.

Several years ago, I spent a glorious week in Chincoteague watching the dolphins and wild ponies, and indulging in some of the best fried chicken and biscuits I’ve ever tasted. I hoped The Shore would capture some of Chincoteague’s beauty, and its charm. It didn’t; more’s the shame.

I couldn't even finish it, let allow give it any stars.

Japan: The Precarious Future

I won't keep you in suspense: this is a dry, academic text, rendered somewhat stale, no less, by events of the past few years. Obviously, I was hoping for more when I came across an essay highlighting some of the demographic findings in The Atlantic earlier this summer. In fact, I had high hopes of being able to assign many of the essays, if not the entire book, to my Business and Culture in Japan students next spring. Given the readability of such trade-centric volumes as Borderless Economies, this didn't seem unreasonable.

Unfortunately, most of the essays in Japan: The Precarious Future - particularly those that do not deal directly with demographics - were too dry to hold my attention, let alone that of my students. What's more, given the evolution of the geopolitical situation in the past year, from the Philippines and the South China Sea, to North Korea, to our own contributions to world instability, many of the essays read as woefully out-of-date. Although the topics remain timely - Japan will face future natural disasters; a visionary PM is still needed to shift the economy; questions of a Japanese military have perhaps never been more relevant - too much that has happened is not included for me to feel that there is real, ongoing value in the essays Frank Baldwin and Annie Allison have edited here.

Unless you are a scholar of all things Japanese, with an insatiable appetite for anything to do with Nihon, it's probably best to skip this one.

No stars. (But who gives stars to academic essays, anyway?)

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China

I have such mixed feelings about Fuchsia Dunlop's Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper... that it's hard to know where to begin. I'll start with this: I most enjoyed the pages that read as travelogue, that recounted China on the verge of its rapid transformation from Old World to New World, that helped me to see places that no longer exist as they once did. 

I least enjoyed much of the writing about food, for reasons that I've been trying to put my finger on for the better part of a week. I think, ultimately, Dunlop's expose, if you will, on Chinese cuisine feels too voyeuristic, and there is too much braggadocio in her reminisces about what she ate and when. I have traveled extensively, in China and elsewhere in Asia. I have eaten chicken's feet. I have eaten duck's heart (better than it sounds). I have eaten duck webs. I have drawn the line at whale and also carpaccio of horse. Other cultures eat "weird" things. Trust me, my local Oriental Mart carries pork blood and beef stomach, along with the ubiquitous chicken feet and duck webs. But then, all cultures eat "weird" things (Cheez Whiz, anyone?), and while I don't doubt that Dunlop has the utmost respect for the Chinese culture, I can't help but feel that this book is simply an open invitation for readers to activate the gag reflex and shudder a collective, "ewww."  

With that said, the book itself is well-written, engaging, and informative about Chinese culture, particularly for those with little knowledge of its history, geography, or demographics. For that, I give it four stars. It's all the rest, what I might term the "gut check," that causes me to lower my overall appreciation of the book and hesitate before recommending it too widely.  

The News of the World

Paulette Jiles’s The News of the World is a delightful, compact novel, of the Old West, without being about the Old West. It’s 1870, and itinerant Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd – valiant soldier of the wars of 1812 and Mexico – has been left penniless by the War Between the States, his small printing business gone, his wife dead, his grown daughters far away in Georgia. And so Captain Kidd does what any man of robust health and a passion for the printed word and road would do: he takes to the road, reading the news to crowds large and small in the dusty towns and backwaters of North Texas.

It’s in one of these towns that he is charged with the return of a young girl, a former Kiowa captive, to her extended family in San Antonio. Reluctant at first, Captain Kidd grows increasingly fond of 10-year-old Johanna as their journey progresses. In her, he sees echoes of his own daughters, now grown, and hope for the future of his beloved state. Other than a few passages about the behavior of former Indian captives that reminded me intensely of Philipp Meyers’s The Son, what I liked most about The News of the World was the utter originality – and then learning from the author’s note that Captain Kidd was, in fact, based on just such a gentleman.

All told, The News of the World is a wonderful read, and one that I can heartily recommend to all comers, particularly, of course, those for a penchant for historical fiction. Four stars.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

I can’t recall when I first read about the Mitfords. (Evelyn Waugh? In the Garden of Beasts?) And although their name was highly familiar, and some aspects of their story somewhat familiar (one of them was a Hitler groupie, if not quite his girlfriend), I couldn’t have accurately stated so much as their names or that there were, in fact, six of them. I did have a sense that the sisters were famous for being famous, and when I laid eyes on the lengthy tome at the library for the first time, I had second thoughts. I can only say that I am very happy that I shushed them and read The Sisters.

As the title suggests, The Sisters is a biography of the six Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah) whose politics, antics, and scandalous behavior rendered them household names in 1930s Britain. There was Diana, who married one of the richest men in Britain, the heir to the Guinness fortune, only to run off with Sir Oswald Mosley (yes, the fascist) when her children were toddlers. Unity was the Hitler groupie who had so convinced herself of the impossibility of war that she simply shot herself at the outbreak, while Jessica ran off to Spain with a black-sheep cousin in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Nancy and Jessica would late become bestselling authors; Deborah became a Duchess who, together with her husband, restored one of England’s most important country houses. (It's no wonder that The Washington Post wrote in Deborah’s obituary – she died in 2014 at 94 – that the Mitfords’ real life squabbles and drama made Downton Abbey look “uneventful.”)

Although in some ways, this is just another romp through the bad behavior of the English Upper Class (see Daughter of Empire or White Mischief for other examples of this genre), Mary Lovell has crafted this biography so that the British Empire, first strong and then rather crumbling, shines through. In that way, this is a book about Old England and England-in-Transition as much as about the Mitford family. The trauma of the King’s abdication is there, as well as the pain and confusion of the years immediately after World War I and then again during the Blitz. For these reasons alone, The Sisters is worth reading, and anyone with an interest in British history will surely enjoy it.

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

So much potential. So disappointing.

The premise of Jim Fergus’s One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is fascinating: President Grant has acquiesced to a Cheyenne chief’s request for 1000 white women brides to come West, marry Cheyenne braves, and teach the Indians how to assimilate into white culture. The request was actually made; Grant, of course, did not acquiesce, but Fergus envisions how it might have gone down, if he had.
 

So, Grant agrees to send the volunteers – a hodge podge of fallen women, war orphans (this being 1875), former mental patients, and the like – to the Cheyennes. Among them is our protagonist, May Dodd, daughter of a wealthy Chicago family who incarcerated her for promiscuity.  May is only too eager for any means out of the institution and remarkably seems to be friend all of the other women, from the former Southern belle to the escaped slave and the identical twin Irish prostitutes. Together they must create a life for themselves with a nomadic people in a harsh land – and with the U.S. Army in pursuit.

Again, the premise is fascinating. The execution, however, was marred by Fergus’s over-reliance on stereotypes – caricatures, really – to depict virtually every single character. It was as though he made a game of fitting as many circa-1875 stereotypes into a single book. The former slave escaped via the Underground Railroad, but not before she had been branded by a cruel master. The Southern belle saw her plantation burned as is reduced to a racist, drawling, laudanum-sipping stupor. The Irish twins run ever scam known to man and invent a few along the way. Ugh.

Perhaps my disgust with One Thousand White Women is a bit overblown, coming fast on the heels of Astoria, which describes both real Indians, and real frontier hardship. (Look up Marie Dorian and then dare to complain about pretty much anything.) I won’t go so far as to call it completely awful, but I can’t recommend it, either.