A compelling, if somewhat overly brief, examination of an intriguing part of presidential history.
Miller and Chang present a look at chefs of Asian descent who cooked for presidents, published by the nonprofit White House Historical Association.
The authors, who were once classmates at Stanford University, team up for a book with two halves: First it’s a narrative history, and then a cookbook. In the first half, Miller, a food writer and attorney who previously worked in the Clinton administration, offers a broad chronicle of notable Asian chefs and stewards, from Ah Loy, a Chinese national who oversaw the galley on Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential yacht in 1905, to Permsin “Tommy” Kurpradit, a child of Thai immigrants who, at the time of the book’s writing, was currently serving as the interim White House executive chef. This series of brief biographies, meant to be “representative, not comprehensive,” covers not only their subjects’ personal lives, but also offers a larger chronology of the experience of people of Asian descent in the United States; one would relish seeing Miller present any (or all) of them in a longer format. The prose is occasionally corny (“Tensions between the delegations were thick enough to cut with a butter knife and egos were as inflated and fragile as a soufflé”), but it’s always deeply engaging. Unlike Miller’s earlier book, the Kirkus-starred Soul Food (2013), in which prose and recipes appeared side by side, this book puts recipes at the end, which feels like a bit of a postscript. The excellent selection relies mostly on an out-of-print 1939 memoir/cookbook by Lee Ping Quan, who cooked for Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge; however, each recipe is fantastically annotated by Chang, a graduate of the Napa Valley Culinary School, who discusses how she chose from over 400 recipes in Quan’s book, and what she changed to reflect modern tastes. (Additional recipes, provided by recent White House chefs, are also good, if considerably more complex.) Occasional photos by White and Hancock are skillfully executed and appealing.
A compelling, if somewhat overly brief, examination of an intriguing part of presidential history.Pub Date: May 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781950273683
Page Count: 184
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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