Job From Home

Amazon.com Review

Barbara Haber’s fascinating From Hardtack to Home Fries bills itself as “An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals.” More exactly, it locates the recurrent intersection of American women’s history and culinary practice and shows how one shaped the other. In lively chapters like “Pretty Much of a Muchness: Civil War Nurses and Diet Kitchens” and “The Harvey Girls: Good Women and Good Food Civilize the American West,” Haber focuses on the untold female contribution to 19th- and 20th-century food culture, an engrossing story. Readers not only encounter great anecdotes–Civil War nurses guarding barrels of whiskey from thieves, for example, or pioneer chain-restaurateur Fred Harvey’s female service corps in action–but discover a hidden American history.

The vividness of the narratives results, largely, from Haber’s excerpts of contemporary diaries and memoirs, like that of World War II POW Sarah Vaughan, who was held by the Japanese in Manila. (”There is a great rush for spinach juice,” Vaughan reported, “on the days this is served.”) In addition, Haber supplies pertinent recipes, like Ella Kellog’s Savory Nut Loaf, a chilling example of 19th-century food-reformist fare, and Baked Fudge, the formula of Cleora Butler, whose unsung cookbooks first explored African American food in the Southwest. These documents tell truths as no others can. Haber’s final and most personal chapter, “Growing Up with Cookbooks,” explores the importance of cookbooks more explicitly, revealing their “intimate power to make connections between people”–to make culture itself. The authors of most of these recipes are women, a fact not lost on Haber, as the delightful Hardtack shows. –Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly

The tasty graham cracker, a beloved bedtime snack of many children, began its life as the linchpin of its originator Sylvester Graham’s fanatical early-19th-century health campaign to curtail sexual excess, especially masturbation and more then once-monthly marital coitus. Facts such as these, interwoven with informed, witty discussions of social, political and economic history, make Haber’s tour through the history of American food so entertaining. Since food has so often been consigned to the domestic realm of woman, Haber’s study is in essence a history of American women: the “Harvey Girls,” who worked in the chain of reasonably priced railroad depot restaurants that revolutionized public eating in the 1880s and ’90s; how Eleanor Roosevelt and her general housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt had to balance White House menus, which had to seem both fancy and economical during WWII; the role of a small tea shop, started by faculty wives in Cambridge, Mass., as a boon to women refugees in the 1940s. While Haber doesn’t explore issues in depth (her discussion of why Irish immigrants were antagonistic to African-Americans would have been helped with references to Noel Ignatiev’s 1996 study How the Irish Became White), she does cover a wealth of material with a breezy style and a fine eye for historical detail.

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From Booklist

Capitalizing on the popularity of Air Force One (2003), journalist Walsh again taps the celebrity-type interest in the trappings of the American presidency–this time in the incumbents’ escape destinations from Washington. An anecdote-driven amble, Walsh’s tour describes the decor, amenities, menus, and similar trivia. Of more historical relevance, Walsh, who for two decades past has held the White House beat for U.S. News & World Report, explores the recuperative value to presidents of getting out of Washington, and what they’ve done when out of town. Walsh crafts this information, which encompasses the entertaining, recreational, gustatory, and bibulous habits of vacationing chief executives, into reflections of their personalities. Gregarious ones such as LBJ and Clinton kept a crowd around, while introverts such as Nixon and Reagan cultivated solitude. Either way, official business often intruded, and Walsh narrates^B the momentous decisions presidents have made while down on a ranch or up at Camp David. Looking at every president since FDR, plus Washington, Jefferson, the two Adamses, and Lincoln, Walsh succeeds in sating popular curiosity in presidents’ private lives. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“An entertaining and illuminating survey of presidential retreats that combines historical research with on-the-job reporting.” — Washington Post

“Walsh succeeds in sating popular curiosity in presidents’ private lives.” — Booklist

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Review

“”Until Donahue and Howell turned their recorders and cameras on these well-chosen survivors living in Kentucky, no one had taken the time to ask how these solitary transplants made new lives for themselves and their children in rural middle America. The stories and images reproduced in this book are both moving and arresting. We owe Donahue and Howell a great debt for rescuing them before they disappeared down the trapdoor of historical memory.”" — Lawrence N. Powell, author of Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana

“”Fascinating…a unique work of traditional history and contemporary art.”" — Examiner.com

Product Description

The term “Holocaust survivors” is often associated with Jewish communities in New York City or along Florida’s Gold Coast. Traditionally, tales of America’s Holocaust survivors, in both individual and cultural histories, have focused on places where people fleeing from Nazi atrocities congregated in large numbers for comfort and community following World War II. Yet not all Jewish refugees chose to settle in heavily populated areas of the United States. In This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak, oral historian Arwen Donahue and photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell focus on overlooked stories that unfold in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They present the accounts of Jewish survivors who resettled not in major metropolitan areas but in southern, often rural, communities. Many of the survivors in these smaller communities did not even seek out the few fellow Jewish residents already there. Donahue transcribes the accounts as she heard them, keeping true to the voices of those she interviewed. One of the survivors who shares her tale, Sylvia Green, describes the pain and desolation of her experiences in the Nazi death camps with a voice that reveals both her German-Polish heritage and her subsequent small-town life in Winchester, Kentucky. The Hungarian-born Paul Schlisser has an equally complex voice, a mix of phrases learned in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and regional speech patterns acquired in his adopted home near Fort Knox. Donahue’s collection of voices, accompanied by Howell’s poignant photographs, identifies each storyteller as an American — and as a Kentuckian. Like many others of diverse backgrounds before them, Holocaust survivors joined the “melting pot” as a haven from the suffering in their native lands, but they eventually came to regard America as home. Although they speak of atrocities, most often experienced when they were children and unable to fully comprehend the situation, they also emphasize the comfort of acceptance — not just by Jewish communities but also by a state that has long equated “religion” with Christianity alone. Kentucky is not known for its cultural and religious diversity, yet these stories reveal one of the many ways that the state has become home to a wide spectrum of immigrants — people who once were strangers but now are its own.

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