Sometimes endlessly informative (for instance, on pasta-making machinery) as it offers more in the way of pasta history than...
Scholarly investigation of the quintessentially Italian carbohydrate.
Quintessentially, but not originally. Food historian Serventi and French social scientist Sabban cannot precisely pinpoint the inventor(s) of pasta and take perhaps overmuch time at the outset laying out reasons why. Shards of linguistic evidence point to an Arabic origin, as does the fact that Sicily was a center of Islamic culture and commerce in antiquity. The idea of Marco Polo returning from China with a bowl of spaghetti is once again debunked with finality, but the roots of bing (ancient Chinese for wheat flour dough) in that part of the world are also plumbed. The authors aim to reveal pasta as a cultural hallmark that spawned a major industry, not to deliver new recipes; however, an extensive section on gastronomy over the ages reveals much. For instance, Italians spent nearly a millennium eating pasta, whether in the form of capelli di pagliacci (clowns’ hats) or strozzaprieti (priest stranglers), cooked until it nearly fell apart and served without any tomato sauce. Available since the 16th century, the tomato was largely ignored in favor of sugar, cinnamon, and things like rendered lard until Neapolitans perfected salsa di pomodoro 300 years later; the term al dente was unheard of until after WWI. Emigration to America brought new phenomena: there were over 300 industrial-sized pasta factories in the States by the ’20s, and after WWII, bureaucrats knew the Marshall Plan was working when pasta exports to war-torn Europe, boosted almost a hundredfold from prewar levels, suddenly plummeted. In the 1960s, inhabitants of the immigrant-founded town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, were found strangely hale and hearty while vascular diseases ravaged the surrounding countryside, causing doctors en masse to endorse the “Mediterranean Diet” of olive oil, wine, and, of course, pasta.
Sometimes endlessly informative (for instance, on pasta-making machinery) as it offers more in the way of pasta history than most readers have even begun to imagine.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-231-12442-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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