Reviews and News:
How the Great Depression and progressive women changed the way we eat. “With pictures from cookbooks and quotations from newspapers, A Square Meal reminds us that the Depression is when loaves and casseroles entered the mainstream American diet, as a way of extending more expensive ingredients and using up leftovers. With the bankruptcy of the old railroad system, the distribution of fresh food became more difficult, and only in longer lasting forms—dried or canned—could ordinary people afford fruits and vegetables. It’s at this point, however, that there enters the villains of Ziegelman and Coe’s account: the progressives who understood that they shouldn’t let a serious crisis go to waste and used the Great Depression as their chance to force all kinds of things down the nation’s throat. I said that they are the villains of the story, but it would have been better to say villainesses, for they were almost all women.”
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Henry Green’s dramatic diction: “Throughout his work Green exhibits a facility for this sort of ‘negative capability,’ although perhaps an even more apt description of his approach is to view it as what T.S. Eliot called an “escape from personality” that the genuine artist seeks to accomplish. Few novelists have achieved the escape from authorial presence, the removal of all traces of direct intervention by the narrative voice, as if the author is hiding, as convincingly as Henry Green.”
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What the age of enlightenment enlightened.
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Stefan Beck reviews The Joys of Travel: “In The Joys of Travel, Swick identifies seven sources of enjoyment guaranteed to the traveler: anticipation, movement, a break from routine, novelty, discovery, emotional connection, and a heightened appreciation of home. I would add an eighth: humility.”
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In Case You Missed It:
What you learn when you learn a poem by heart.
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The “miraculous” story of Latin literature: “There were many other advanced civilizations contemporary to and in contact with the Greeks—Egyptians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Jews, Persians—yet only the Romans used Greek literary models to create what would become the Western world’s first vernacular literature.”
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Europe’s single currency has been “an economic and political disaster.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz explains “how the dollar operates smoothly across America’s 50 economically diverse states, noting ‘important adjustment mechanisms’ such as large interstate tax and benefit transfers, and the common language, which helps workers find employment in different states. The euro, on the other hand, ‘was created in a way that sowed the seeds of its own destruction’.”
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Kim Jong-un bans sarcasm. “Officials told people that sarcastic expressions such as ‘This is all America’s fault’ would constitute unacceptable criticism of the regime.”
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Podcast: Ben Domenech speaks with Nicholas Eberstadt about unemployed American men.
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Classic Essay: Michael Straight, “The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien”
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