Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday March 17, 2011
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WHEELS OF CHANGE: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way)
Sue Macy
National Geographic
ISBN 978-1426307614
$18.95
Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan
A true vehicle of social change, the bicycle went from oddity in 1878 to commonplace by 1895, affecting the place of women in society in ways that were debated by men and women alike. Some, like the crusader Charlotte Smith, sought to protect women's morals, saying bicycle riding lured "young girls into paths that lead directly to sin." Others cited the benefits of vigorous exercise, fresh air and greater freedom of movement. As the wife of a New York City minister put it, "A girl who rides a wheel is lifted out of herself and her surroundings."
In her well researched and wonderfully illustrated history, Sue Macy conveys the profound early effects of the bicycle on American life, from feminine fashion and fitness to religion and politics. She starts with the mechanics, briskly moving from 1817's laufmaschine (running machine) to the hobbyhorse, boneshaker and high wheeler. Women's customary long skirts were downright dangerous on a bike, and soon bloomers and divided skirts came into vogue despite considerable societal uproar.
Macy has put together a fascinating sampling of vintage images to show the power and pervasiveness of bicycling women. By 1896, Susan B. Anthony could already perceive -- and applaud -- the bicycle's influence: "I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."
-- Abby McGanney Nolan
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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AN EXTRAVAGANT HUNGER: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher
Anne Zimmerman
Counterpoint
ISBN 978-1582435466
261 pages
$26
Reviewed by Sarah Halzack
M.F.K. Fisher's life was tumultuous. She never stayed in one place very long, had no shortage of marital strife and family tensions, and battled an oft-recurring sadness. But throughout, there was one constant: the deep pleasure she took from a delicious meal. The acclaimed author of books about food and dining saw eating not merely as a way to gain sustenance, but as a singular experience to relish and cherish.
In "An Extravagant Hunger," Anne Zimmerman mines Fisher's journals and letters to create a rich portrait of a troubled, talented woman with a hearty appetite. "No matter her location or level of emotional anguish, she always noticed the meal in front of her," Zimmerman writes. "From her first salad on the rumbling train into Paris, to the inky wines that swayed in her glass on (a ship called) the Cellina, the colors and flavors of great food and wine brought her incomparable pleasure."
Born Mary Francis Kennedy in 1908, Fisher had an unusual fixation on food even as a child. Her live-in grandmother was a dominant force in the family kitchen and held steadfast to the belief that bland, unseasoned foods were healthiest. Fisher loathed these dull meals so much that she looked forward to her grandmother's trips out of town and the chance to sneak some flavorful, adventurous fare into her diet.
Later, when Fisher excitedly moved overseas with her first husband, her letters home were dominated by descriptions of cuisine and wine she had savored. Still, despite her interest in the topic, it took her a long time to realize she could make a career of writing about food (and, perhaps more important, that she wanted to). Nevertheless, when she finally published her first book, "Serve it Forth" (1937), it was nothing short of groundbreaking. Zimmerman explains that, until then, women's contributions to gastronomical writing were largely limited to cookbooks and how-to guides. "Never before had a woman written so sensually about her intimate enjoyment of food," she points out. With later books, Zimmerman adds, "M.F.K. Fisher had created a genre all her own."
Fisher's rise to professional success is uplifting, but her personal life was quite the opposite. In fact, her life's overarching theme was loneliness. She was an outcast at school, lived isolated in France for much of her loveless first marriage, and endured a bleak and stifling period in her second marriage when her husband was stricken with a grave illness. Yet Fisher's hopeless struggle for happiness and her soap opera-worthy love life -- as well as Zimmerman's careful attention to detail and suspenseful pacing -- will keep readers turning these pages.
Sarah Halzack can be reached at halzacks(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Gabrielle Hamilton
Random House
ISBN 978-1400
291 pages
$26
Reviewed by Joe Yonan, the editor of The Washington Post's Food and Travel sections
A strange image graces the cover of Gabrielle Hamilton's luminous new memoir, "Blood, Bones & Butter." At first glance it might be an oyster, slipping off its half shell and nestled in some kind of grassy nest, with a pearl at its center and frills underneath. Is this the futuristic creation of some modernist chef?
Then you realize that the pearl is an eye and those frills are feathers. Turning the cover upside down reveals the unmistakable head -- severed, one assumes -- of a glaring, sharp-beaked rooster. Along with the title, it's the first clue that Hamilton's story will be visceral and possibly even revelatory.
Sure enough, Hamilton quickly proves that her decade-in-the-making work can live up to the extraordinary "best memoir by a chef ever" hype. That quote, by the way, is from the previous title holder, Anthony Bourdain, whose 2000 blockbuster, "Kitchen Confidential," hilariously deglamorized restaurants while simultaneously feeding the fire of public obsession with celebrity chefs. Hamilton, chef-owner of the tiny Greenwich Village restaurant Prune, shares two of Bourdain's traits: a wicked, sometimes obscene sense of humor and a past checkered with drug use and crime. But as he admits in his jacket testimonial, she's the superior writer by a mile.
To read "Blood, Bones & Butter" is to marvel at Hamilton's masterful facility with language. She turns something as mundane as the deep-frying of "stacks and stacks" of flour tortillas at a touristy Pennsylvania restaurant when she was 15, for instance, into a duo of evocative metaphors: The tortilla "would float and sizzle on the surface for a moment like a lily pad on a pond," she writes. "Then, with a deep ten-ounce ladle, I pushed down in the center, and the tortilla came up around the bowl like the long dress and underskirts of a Victorian woman who had fallen, fully clothed, into a lake, her skirts billowing up around her heavy sinking body."
She manages to make an account of killing a chicken just as poetic (if more gruesome). As her dismayed father watched, she spun the bird around to disorient it, laid its head on the block and raised the hatchet: "This first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin. I hurried to strike it again, but lost a few seconds in my grief and horror. The second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale. The bird started to orient."
Like Bourdain, she strips the work of restaurateuring -- and catering before it -- down to its least glamorous realities. There are maggot-filled rats to deal with, a neighbor wanting to talk about the water bill during the chaos of the Sunday brunch rush, a line cook giving eight days' notice when Hamilton is nine months pregnant. The latter led to the following To-Do list:
Get w/AT and limit menu
Train CR on a 2-man line
Call Roode for fill-in?
Have Baby
Tell brunch crew vinaigrette too acidic
Pick up white platters
Change filters in hoods
Figure out pomegranate syrup.
But those are side dishes to Hamilton's main course: the story of her search for identity and belonging after her parents' divorce in her early adolescence. Her French mother moved to Vermont, and her father left her and her 17-year-old brother alone for weeks at a time, an abandonment that "may have been an oversight, like leaving your cup of coffee on the roof of the car while you dig out your keys and then drive off." Whether it was parental influence or not -- memories of her father's lamb roasts and of learning to cook by "opening old jars of stuff my mother had left behind in the pantry" -- she gravitated to restaurants, working first as a dishwasher as a young teenager and then on to the line, with a stint as a grifting cocktail waitress thrown in for good measure.
"Blood, Bones & Butter" tells of Hamilton's drift from "catering hacker" to summer-camp cook to university writing student, listless and searching. She found meaning in the opportunity to open her own restaurant in the spot where a bankrupt one had been fossilizing. She had never even supervised a restaurant kitchen, let alone owned one, and she's just as surprised as the reader at how brilliant she is at it. It turns out that her biggest source of inspiration, in hindsight anyway, was an aimless backpacking trip through Europe in her 20s, horribly ill-timed in the middle of a miserable winter. She didn't "stage" in Michelin-starred kitchens like so many driven chef wannabes; she instead drifted, near-penniless, through Greece, Turkey and France, depending on the hospitality of strangers to ease her hunger. She sold cigarettes and lottery tickets at the cash register of a "sports bar cum creperie" in Brittany, where she ate the same meal every day for weeks on end without getting tired of it. "I was sucking something in," she writes. "Something unmitigated. This is the crepe. This is the cider. This is how we live and eat."
Those taste memories and others fuel a stripped-down, let's-just-have-a-dinner-party cooking philosophy that perfectly suited New York in the late 1990s. "There would be no foam and no 'conceptual' or 'intellectual' food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry," she writes.
Of course, Prune was a smash hit, and Hamilton became one of the standard-bearers of a particular type of Manhattan restaurant: small, ingredient-focused, chef-driven. But as attached as she was to the staff at her restaurant, her search for family went on, which might be why she so easily dropped her Michigander girlfriend in favor of an Italian man who "washed up on the shores of the kitchen and landed his sights on me." She stumbled into marriage as nonchalantly as she had stumbled into cooking, becoming a reluctant wife and mother whose annual trips to visit his family in Puglia sounded appealing when she related them to friends but were becoming ever more stifling in reality.
If you're hoping the memoir culminates in an Oprah moment, this is not the book for you. Hamilton is too devoted to grit and realism to allow her story to be neatly resolved. In her telling, it's not so much "Eat, Pray, Love" as "Snort, Steal, Cook." Nonetheless, one of the biggest thrills of "Blood, Bones & Butter" is watching her self-discovery unspool as the independent streak she was forced to nurture at such a young age takes stronger and stronger hold. By the book's end, she may or may not have found herself, but one thing is clear: She is reluctant no more.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES
Deborah Harkness
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022410
579 pages
$28.95
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand, whose most recent novel is "Illyria"
"This is a book about books," Deborah Harkness says in the acknowledgments to her first novel, "A Discovery of Witches." But don't be fooled by that statement, or the fact that Harkness is a noted scholar on the history of science and the author of several works on the Elizabethan era. What "A Discovery of Witches" is really about is yet another unconsummated affair between a mortal (though supernatural) woman and a hot, smoldering-eyed vampire who explores his feelings with statements such as, "I will not give in to this craving for her blood. I do not want to control her power. And I certainly have no wish to make her a vampire."
"That leaves love," his confidant retorts. "You have your answer, then."
Readers will get their answers, as well -- mostly unsurprising ones, if they're familiar with the novels of Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice and Kelley Armstrong. Harkness' book opens with Diana Bishop, an American academic, perusing a mysterious, alchemical manuscript known as "Ashmole 782," in the reading room of Oxford's Bodleian Library. "Traces of gilt shone along its edges and caught my eye. But those faded touches of gold could not account for a faint, iridescent shimmer that seemed to be escaping from between the pages."
"782" is no ordinary manuscript, and Dr. Bishop is no ordinary historian. She is the last of the Bishop witches, whose ancestor was executed in Salem. Alas, neither their magical powers nor Harvard educations could save Diana's anthropologist parents from nasty, witchcraft-inflicted deaths during a research trip to Africa, leaving their orphan daughter to be raised by her aunt, another witch. A whiz at whatever she turns her hand to, Diana stubbornly eschews the use of magic. She still manages to start college at 16 and goes on to earn a doctorate in 17th-century chemistry from Oxford, where she opens that shimmering bundle of parchment and discovers that three pages have been removed, hinting at a bibliophiliac mystery a la A.S. Byatt's "Possession."
"782" is, in fact, a book sleeping within a book -- a magical palimpsest that, long ago, was bewitched to respond to Diana's touch. Unfortunately, Harkness appears to have been bewitched by another sort of book. Enter Matthew Clairmont, a professor of biochemistry affiliated with Oxford Neuroscience, member of the Royal Society and, yes, a vampire.
"As my eyes swept over him, his own were fixed on me ... black as night, staring up under thick, equally black eyebrows, one of them lifted in a curve that suggested a question mark. ... Above his chin was one of the few places where there was room for softness -- his wide mouth. ... But the most unnerving thing about him was not his physical perfection. It was his feral combination of strength, agility, and keen intelligence that was palpable across the room."
That Matthew is a vampire comes as no shock to Diana. Hers is a world populated by witches, vampires and demons, who coexist, Harry Potter-style, with Muggle-ish humans, known as warmbloods. One of Harkness' more charming notions is that witches and demons, along with the odd vampire, are often found in libraries, the way angels haunt Berlin in Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire." These supernatural creatures coexist in an uneasy alliance designed to keep humans from being aware of their existence. But the missing pages from "782" suggest that something ominous is afoot, and Diana's unwitting awakening of ancient magic has brought her to the attention of all sorts of creatures, including Matthew Clairmont.
A pas de demon ensues. Will Diana succumb to Matthew's charms, his eyes that twinkle "like black stars," his "hungry lips," his cool fingers that "touched the only inches of my body that remained uncharted"? Is the pope a vampire?
Well, actually, in these pages he is, but even a too-brief cameo by a bloodthirsty medieval pontiff doesn't liven things up. Matthew is 1,500 years old; this novel's pacing is so torpid that readers may feel that aged, too. Various plot elements -- a series of murders, the analysis of supernatural DNA, revelations of an ancient order of creatures modeled on the Knights Templar, and a vicious Finnish witch, not to mention those three missing pages -- are introduced then swiftly forgotten, so as to get back to Diana and Matthew exchanging soulful looks. As in the "Twilight" series and untold romance novels, sexual consummation is delayed, though there's a lot of consensual creature foreplay.
But Harkness does get in a few nice set pieces. The lovers' sojourn in Matthew's ancestral chateau is well-done, and some of the supporting characters are marvelous, notably Matthew's mother, a vampire chatelaine. French vampires don't get fat; they don't get old, either.
The pace finally steps up in the last 100 pages. The ending, in which Diana and Matthew beat a hasty retreat, made me wish the book had started there. If Harkness doesn't ring many changes upon the overworked tropes of paranormal romance, at least she leaves readers with hope of a more engaging sequel.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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