Dove Finisce la Notte, Hotel on Shadow Lake by Daniela Tully translated by Vera Sarzano

Dove Finisce la Notte, Hotel on Shadow Lake by Daniela Tully translated for the italian version published by Garzanti by Vera Sarzano is a powerful book. 
At many levels.

It analyzes in fact a fragmented, tormented society not anymore free under all aspects; cultural, human. The claustrophobic sensation of not being in grade of doing anymore normal activities as in the past, like being who the person wants to be or just is or an activity like reading a book by an author appreciated but "banned" by the dictatorship means sadness, poverty, and an important loss of personal freedom; this lack of freedom is revealed in all its powerful devastation.

Yes, it was known that at a certain point Adolf Hitler created a list of unwanted authors, banning them, burning that books on 1933. People who tried their best for making a strong opposition to the regime he created and that would have brought Europe to the last Second World War were not seen well at all.
Thomas Mann one of the favorite authors of our heroine who had created a special and secret place carved in her house for these prohibited books was one of them.
The list of books that were burned included A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, How I Became a Socialist by Helen Keller, The Iron Heel, The Jacket and Martin Eden by Jack London, An Appeal to Reason by Thomas Mann, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, The Outline of History by HG Wells, Monographs about Marc Chagall and Paul Klee, and all books published before 1933 written by Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, John Dos Passos and many more.
I highly suggest to all of you of reading these authors who made the difference. Hermann Hesse is not in this list but as remarked in the book by the author, he helped some writers in the while. I read most of the production by Hesse when a teenager. Another author you will love a lot. 

There is this sense suffocation in that historical period and the author capture it vividly; when situations are so limiting for people, and when any kind of human expression can't be expressed but repressed for fear and when there is the uncertainty of the "other" seen constantly with doubt and suspect and not anymore with the old and dear trust of more happiest periods where liberty meant everything.

The story opens on 1990 with the arrival of a letter "from the past" at the house of an old lady called Martha, pretty methodical. Martha lived a good and serene existence, her day was scheduled perfectly. Not that of course it is not possible to receive beauty news, but she didn't for sure wait anymore new, big, unexpected surprises from the remote past of her existence, and not from her teenage age! but once her post man brought her a letter written many decades ago, she returned to that distant years, when she fell in love for a blond and beautiful boy, later disappeared forever.

It was on 1990 that Maya the nephew of Martha attended a school year in Tarrytown close to NYC. Her granny always said her she had to visit the world, for learning more, for appreciate it.
Her granny would have disappeared in that distant land, and what remained of her discovered after many years from her disappearance. But why that trip? Why the USA, when her granny lived in Germany and, apparently she didn't have connection with the USA?

Martha...She was an avid reader, and she didn't like at all Hitler and the regime he established. She didn't live well the period close to the beginning of the Second World War. She lived with her mom and her twin brother Wolfgang with which in the past she was united. Wolfgang changed a lot with the arrival on scene of Hitler, a dictator he loved so badly. That 1938 was characterized by the the entrance in scene of Siegfried, a boy with which Martha will falls in love with and not just her...; someone not German, someone who worked for the Allies, and for the USA.

Now, let me introduce you the Resort Montgomery, a place with an intricate history.

Everything started when Franz decided to leave Europe for the USA, because of debts he had accumulated in the while. He wasn't a clear person at all and once arrived in the USA and in that corner of the world, so green, so beauty and fascinating, appreciated by a lot of people, President Roosevelt included, he decided that that place would have been his one. He did all his best for ruin the other proprietor of the Resort, mr Stockwell and he would have continued to cause a lot of sadness and unhappiness to everyone close to him, his wife, his children included.

Speaking of children, the arrival of Hans meant a lot of expectations, because Franz thought that Hans would have continued the familiar activity. But Hans was bewitched by the arrival in their resort of Roosevelt and a too much wonderful opportunity he could not refuse. So, Franz, after the marriage of Hans with Elisa, once Hans abandoned the wife, would have had the ungrateful obligation of warming the bed of the young, poor girl left alone, impregnating her various times; that eccentric boy, Hans didn't mind and was in search of freedom from constrictions and a defined future, "marching" in the unknown and in a country, where freedom the word he was searching for, was just a pale memory.

Maya when discovers what happened to her granny flies to the USA and decides to stay at the Resort, understanding pretty soon that her granny was killed, for what seen by the authoptic exam; and maybe there was still a dangerous criminal somewhere free.

Ben is the nephew of mr Montgomery and he organizes that days Maya is in the resort a creative writing course. Thinking that he has in front of her a famous Northern European writer, he suggests her of following the courses. Not only: the two will also become pretty soon in love.

Maya accepts to let believe to people that she is who she isn't. It will be just for a while. The revelation of the murder is written and based on a fairy tale that I would suggest to you of reading very well The Fairy of War and in the forest, where it seems that most of the protagonists of this tale discovered a secure refugee...

The author at the end said that this book was directly inspired by her grand-dad and grand-mother's letters and material that they had accumulated in the while. Stunning!

I found this book impressively fascinating; it sounded as if time was suspended and characters and familiar dynamics were pretty complicated in particular the one of the Montgomery Family.

The author is at her first novel but she was part of movie projects like Contagion, The Marigold Hotel, and the stunning beautiful movie (and book) The Help.

I thank Garzanti for the ebook.

Anna Maria Polidori

Album Unpublished Correspondence and Texts Roland Barthes Translated by Jody Gladding

Album Unpublished Correspondence and Texts Roland Barthes Translated by Jody Gladding treats for the first time, published in english, texts and correspondence of the beloved and estimated french philosopher, literary theorist, semiotician.
Born in Cherbourg, the existence of Barthes has been characterized by study, thinking, books from the early years of his existence as you will read.

He was a serious and devoted, voracious letter-writer. I loved the letters from the sanatorium where he spent a lot of time; he was after all in good mood, as you will see.
Young Barthes continued to reading in the while; from Anatole France, to Valerie, from Proust, adding of this last one "Proust is at heart a prose poet....H analyzes all the sensations and memories that this act awakens in him..." to Racine and many more.

Speaking of that outside world left alone for a long while, he wrote to
one of his main friends, "Every point of comparison must be suppressed between the past - house, mother, friends, Paris streets, the living world - where everything is possible - and the present ..."

Writing to a friend he was in love with: "I really think that what divides us has no meaning...It's not the desire of comfort that leads me to air my feelings, but...the illusion that one will see through my weakness -which is irresponsible of me-to what I feel to be there of strength and grandeur."

Poetic man, and wonderful writer, his sensations didn't know any sort of reticence. He was an honest man in his writings and feelings reporting without doubt and great clarity what he felt, his impressions, whatever the topic could be. Books, love, friendship, health.

After the last second world war, we see that Barthes starts his career as a writer, at the research of a publishing house, and writer of the first  critical works. 
The book follows the successes and life of Barthes 'till the end and these correspondences includes letters to Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marthe Robert and others.

You will also find, if you are interested as a teacher or as a student other material in the transcripts from his seminars.
I loved The Postage Stamp. When there were still letters, stamps meant a lot for the sender and they were socially a way for introducing us in other cultures as well.

On Seven Sentences the reader will be immersed in the...sentence's world.

This one is a book that can be explored. You can start with certain correspondence, you can pass to various other sections happily and without to feel any kind of disconnection and first of all, always finding what you are searching for.

The book can be read by everyone without any kind of difficulty.

I love the cover.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori

Eating Culture An Anthropological Guide to Food by Gillian Crowther

Eating Culture An Anthropological Guide to Food by Gillian Crowther published by University of Toronto Press reached the second edition recently.

Splendidly illustrated, this superb book is mainly an anthropological cultural guide, that I know you will find truly fascinating; a trip of man through food and its most profound meaning.

We are what we it; what we eat define us; nothing is more interconnected with us than food.
Why?
Maybe because eating can't be avoided and the place where we live, the cultural traditions and foods that accompany us during our existence, speak for us, for our community and our way of living and our way of life.

Men are omnivorous and this one is a fact.
What I didn't know is that the fact that we are bipedalist, caused not just a change of perspective also in terms of research of food (and there, I was) but also a biggest dispersion of energy.
Men in fact learned how to hunting and procure food for themselves and their families with different systems, and with a best geniality than not how our progenitors did.

But what to eat and how, when, where? And: do we eat well?

Prohibitions are part of religion. I remember our jewish friend; he asked us of avoid any kind of pork meat because of religious respect; chinese, as remarked in this book eats dogs meat with normality; to the western population it would mean a horror.

Americans for example don't tend of eating rabbits, or pigeon's meat (for what some friends told me; although of course they can learn).

But how much food can interact with religion?
We have seen the respect brought by Jewish to religion, but another great and spiritual land loves to do the same: it is India.

There is a profound relationship between spiritual and physical health passing through food. "You are what you eat and You eat what you are" is their main thought about the strict relationship existing between food and man.

In a sacred text  it's written: "Without a proper diet, medicines are of no use: with a proper diet, medicines are unnecessary."
For Ayurvedic medicine diet means also the harmonic balance between body, mind and spirit.

Sure diets are many and the most diversified. Some of them can also be "addressed" by politicians for promoting the food of the country where they live in, Patriotically.

Diets can let us introduce "distant" foods, that in the past we didn't know, from spices to fruits, that reached us recently and that are experiencing a lot of success.
Sure the most devastating diet has been the fast food one.
Could we call it a diet? Yes but also an habit.
A wrong one, and in this book of course reported the problems that a massively use and abuse of this habit or diet, can brings with the time.


Man with the time learned, of course at various altitude and with the cultural, social, environmentalists differences that there are to build his own cultural, social community; a cultural and social community that would have passed through food seen as the most important passport and identity.
The author speaks largely of a little community in Alaska where they are big consumers of salmon; to them eating salmon is not just introducing a fish, but salmon is who they are as social entity and identity.

With the time man settled down in various areas of the Planet discovering an agricultural role, and giving space to pastoralism as well.

In recent centuries man discovered also how to chemically fertilize our lands. Who was the inventor of fertilizers?
A German chemist called Justus von Liebig.
He discovered the chemical composition of soil and so he started to add new substances for producing more.
We are in the modern age; the one based on an agriculture made by fertilizers and speaking about animals, mass production. Although the romantic farm still exists, there are also new realities in grade to give to consumers a lot of meal at a good price.

Not only: lately we have seen the arrival of GMO on our tables.

In the past there was but still there is, the market where people tended to buying the most of it, food included, from spices, to fruit.
These places are not completely replaced by supermarkets, but of course, recently we have seen an exponential growth of them as well.

Ad advice giving in this book? Read labels before to buying food that you will put industrial food on your table.

Agriculture is a sector always more exported or imported. We search for exotic food and we export our own fruits and cheese and whatever it is possible to imagine.
Cooking means being social, and as you will see it will be largely treated in the book.

After food what is there? The memory of it and often the memory of it passes through cookbooks of every possible sorta. Some recipes aggregated in a cookbook remarks the identity of some typical food of a certain corner of the world.
In this book we see a smiling Italian-Canadian lady with a copy of the Artusi cook book the Bible of the italian cuisine.

Often recipes are also passed by mother to daughter but also in a contest of community when there is a situation of publicly cook.

An important section of the book is about commensality.
I found captivating  Eating Out and Gastronomy; our modalities of eating food when we are outside. Street-food, pizzas, but also eating sitting down.

Now more than in any other eras we think globally acting locally, and eating "internationally".

Eating means as also remind us the author ethicism; a person could find frustration of adding foods available for us and considered chic when the local poor population where this food is cultivated can't eat it.

Eating doesn't pass just from our mouth but also our heart and consciousness.

Absolutely beautiful and wonderful book; plenty of curiosities, you'll understand everything  about food, its own history and at the same time the story of Man, his relationship with lands, sea, animals because of...food and what food meant for many cultures sometimes very different from our one.

Highly recommended.

I thank  University of Toronto Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori

L'Assemblea dei Morti The Meeting of the Deads by Tomas Barbulo

If you love the genre, L'Assemblea dei Morti The Meeting of the Deads by Tomas Barbulo is for you., Funny, quick, captivating, if you love thriller, go for this one. You will surely read a great book and a story orchestrated with great intelligence and humor. 

Madrid. Three men, unemployed or with frustrating jobs that can't bring food on their tables thanks to the poverty are contacted by El Guapo, who previously had spoken with someone very important for a special, absolutely lucrative job.

Rich, important, with great connections, this powerful man asks at El Guapo for 2 million of euros of stealing in a bank located at Marrakesh, Morocco, jewels for an amount of 6 million of euros.
During the first approach and conversation and when the potential burglar didn't know where the place was located, he said no, but then, thinking that maybe he could have done it with a certain simplicity, he contacts other three people, and all together, wives included and other people met along their way they will afford to Morocco because of this rubbery, although you know, this one will be an adventure...


The author is a journalist. Barbulo is a reporter for El Pais in the Middle-East.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori

The only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict

Marie Benedict is enchanting. There are no other ways orowordsofor describing all her books and her writing-style, delicate, penetrating and psychologically engaging.  You are cuddled by her words and the fascinating atmosphere she creates every time. 

Her previous books, Carnegie's Maid and The Other Einstein revealed us the characters of two stunning women like she does also in this latest novel, The Only Woman in the Room. In this one, there is a stunning reconstruction of the suffering years that preceeded the beginning of the horror that was the Last Second World War Conflict and not only. The book is divided in two parts as the life of the protagonist has been.

I didn't know anything of Hedy Lamarr before reading this book, a character who can't be forgotten with simplicity.

It happened not just to Lamarr, Austrian, to ending in the hands of someone in the other part of the barricade before that the Second World War would started: victims and torturers.

Jewish, and proud to be a Jewish, Hedwig Kiesler of Dobling Austria,  at 18 years made a movie, censored,  and she was the protagonist of Sissi at the theater of Wien. She starts to be courted by an influential, rich man of a certain age, Fritz, Friedrich Mandl. Mandl created and sold munitions to people of extreme right: he had direct contacts with Mussolini and the rest of the fascists and nazists borning establishment in the various European States, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany.

Substantially he was in contact with dictators.

Fritz appears terribly romantic with this girl presenting her wagons of roses every day after the show of Sissy and going directly to speak with the parents of the girl asking for the hand of their daughter.

Worries were many and this choice was made by the parents of Hedwig "opportunistically", thinking that maybe their daughter and family and village would have escaped the horror that the dad of Hedwig was imagining in a few years.

The sensation that something horrible would have happened to them in case of a no was too big.

At the same time, the girl falls fascinated in the while by this man; she eats with him in plates that are made by real gold and in stunning places, so she is both surprised and pleased by these wonderful attentions.

She says at some point: "The success in Sissy, my burgeoning relationship with Fritz, they felt too perfect to be real. Unearned, Mama would say."

The marriage will be celebrated in a catholic church and the girl constricted also to become christian.

After the wedding as sometimes happens, the groom is not anymore the peaceful and nice man known before and Fritz is part of this gang. Oh, the honeymoon appeared to be so romantic; Italy, France, the most stunning localities that a newly wed couple can dream of, but what this girl will tell us, the book is written in first person, is that Fritz at some point will start to be "different." Yes, she covered the girl of attentions, but what he wanted was someone beauty to be displayed during their numerous lunches and events.

His mantra was that "The power of money always prevail."

We will see that Fritz gave hospitality to Mussolini, that he personally knew and many other esponents of right while, the girl started always more that these events continued to going on and hatred against Jewish more strong and dangerous, to be worried.

Situation deteriorates in particular during the vision of the movie where the girl is protagonist.

Fritz thinks that she shouldn't go out anymore closing her in his estates. Like a bird in a cage.

The girl decides to going away, but how to do that? She tries several times and then she does it.

She affords to London and then to Los Angeles, where she starts a new life with a new last name, Lamarr.

Considering what she knew and heard during conversations, meetings, lunches, dinners of her husband with the dictators of the moment, Hedy will be helpful during the second world war.

A consideration of the protagonist of this book: "My personal history and every path I could have chosen in my past had shaped my present", says.

That's why she had to acting, believing in someone for doing it.

A wonderful book this one, intense as the previous ones written by Marie Benedict. She is one of my favorite writers and so I want to read immediately her works, they are stunning and there is a great sensibility and description are paradisiacally beauty, there is a richness of interiority that this author is in grade to transmit to her readers while she becomes her characters giving them a strong voice. 

I want, just before to close this review to open a parenthesys regarding Sissi.

I read various biographies of Sissi, and in this sense I didn't know at all that she  lived secluded because of her husband.

Francis Joseph found, helped by Sissi a lover in an actress of theater, now I forgot the name of this girl, while Sissi continued to live her own life, yes, devastated by the loss of his son Rudolph and the death, never clarified of his beloved cousin Ludwig; I din't know at all that the emperor kept her secluded; considering her character it wouldn't never been possible. At the end the ladies chosen for staying close to Sissi were not anymore "picked up" for the importance that they had at court, but because healthy and with a strong constitution. Sissi loved to walk per kilometers also during the night and it requested ability, a good and energetic body. I didn't know of this role played by Francis Joseph. 

I thank NetGalley and Sourcebooks for this ebook.

Anna Maria Polidori

A Moveable Feast The Restored Edition by Ernest Hemingway

I didn't read boks written by people who killed themselves.

It was a strong guidelines that I followed per decades. It was as if, in their books, somewhere I would have found some traces of what they would have done later and I had heard when too little too much  and when you can't metabolize what happened or the meaning of horrible situations like the one of listening what adults said of people who killed themselves I simply closed doors. Emotively. 

Speaking with people of culture they said me that it was an irrational  behavior this one. "Who cares how a writer died?" they said me but to me this one was a fundamental point. All the story made me fear.

It made me fear to read words expressed by someone who, later would have decided to leave the world in this way.

Per decades I avoided, strongly avoided also Ernest Hemingway.

Not only: I bought most of his books but scared, as I did also with a beautiful book by Van Gogh, (painters were included in the list of course) I presented them to libraries or just renstituted.

Then, maybe, I simply mentally grew up and these obsessions over.

In the case of Ernest Hemingway, Woody Allen made the miracle with Midnight in Paris, breaking all my resistances and restituting the image of a man with which everyone would have fallen in love with, because with strong opinions, great observer, in love for life and people, common ones, cafès, food and wine, sociality; someone not snob but a decent man with everyone, helpful; at the end a good, surely troubled man. No one write if there are not demons in his/her souls.

Thanks to the book I read and reviewed involving Shakespeare and Company, I thought that it was time for him.

I read James Joyce at 15 years, oh The Doubliners, it was an adventure! I will tell you in another occasion; I read Francis Scott Fitzgerald a lot of time ago.

I picked up A Moveable Feast

the posthoumus book published by Scribner after three years from the departure of the writer; this edition has been restored if compared at the previous one and it is amazing. I read it today in few hours. Hemingway knows how to capture the attention of the reader. It's like a long conversation with the reader although this one is alsoaan intimistic tale and a vivid portrait of what experienced by Ernest Hemingway and his wife when in Paris and when there was still uncertainty about his future.

Oh, it is an enxchanting book, of an enchanting Paris and enchanting and supportive people. 

Hemingway remembers that "Many are stronger at the broken places. ...This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and  very happy."

Hemingway remembers the years of Paris with great joy defining also his financial problems. No: he and his wife refused to think, psychologically that they were poor. They anyway, tried all their best for saving and not spend a lot of money. At first Hemingway worked for a Toronto magazine and other important european magazines and it meant to afford in various european places with a good dress, a good hair cut, good shoes. Social life means also spending more money, it is known.

Hemingway remembers in this book how difficult it was to be starved in Paris. Wherever you went you saw a good patisserie, or a bakery store and not being in grade of buying that heavinly good  food was a real devastation.

Ernest Hemingway wasn't a guy who loved to write isolated by the rest of the world, alienated by everything and everyone.

All the opposite, our man was an addicted social guy! He searched for people, for moods, for conversations, for beauty, expressions. 

He searched for the reality, for real people, for describing people, for reporting a face, a dialogue, a special moment. Hemingway remembered all people touched his existencee He knew too well that life is in motion, in fact once,  when he went to Lyon for following a strained Scott Fitzgerald he remarked the lost of time, spent in a sort of nonsense considering what happened. He would have preferred to stayin in a café chatting with someone or just writing down a new story while drinking a beer and tasting some delicious food.

If you are a writer I would suggest this book also to you because if you search for  tips or suggestions, it is precious.

Substantially what I honestly think is that Hemingway hasn't never lost his touch as a reporter.

Detailed but essential, his writing-style is engaging and funny, and most important, honest with himself and with other ones.

He felt anthypaty for someone and he wrote it without too many compliments.

You won't find a truth modified just because there are a lot of writers and known people involved. Clear and honest, his truth and perception of reality result vivid, healthy, clear. I found him cryptic in the final chapters and he sounded as "broken."

When installed to Paris, money were not sufficient for buying new books. How to do that?

One day Hemingway discovered Shakespeare and Company and mainly Sylvia Beach a lady in grade to be helpful with everyone. Ernest couldn't buy new books because too poor and Sylvia with trust and pleasure lent him wagons of books. Bookstalls were another favorite place where Ernest loved to buying used books, as you will read. And it is interesting what he will tell about these bookstalls although it is with Sylvia Beach that Hemingway established an exclusive friendship and, as always, Sylvia like a guardian angel will be supportive, helping him in many different encouraging ways. 

Another special friend by Hemingway per years was Gertrude Stein, remembered by the beloved author as someone who wouldn't never read a book written by an author  who did not speak well of her writings. In a way or in another, this friendship ended. Stein puts in discussion all the authors young Ernest reads; for respect, she was much more old then him he was frank but kept for himself his most private considerations about the opinions of his friend.

Per years, Ernest Hemingway was a great friend of Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Scott Fitzgerald became a heavy drunker pretty soon and when he fell sick because of alcohol, he reports Hemingway he had like the face of a dead person.

Later, situation became heaviest. Scott Fitzgerald became unsober starting from the early morning while Zelda became mentally sick, but surely this one has been one of the most important friends of Ernest Hemingway at long.

Beautiful book, written with heart and with a powerful prose the title A Moveable Feast was an expression used by Hemingway for describing these immensely joyous years of his youth to Paris.

I want to close with this quote by Hemingway: "There is never ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it."

Anna Maria Polidori

Eating Ethically by Jonathan K.Crane

A lot of people are obese because they indulge too much in eating, and food industries are all happy to serve all hours, night and day food for enthusiastic consumers. We eat too much or not at all, cutting out from our diet a lot of foods; if you have Jewish friends, you know that generally pork meat and also other foods are avoided from their diet. The genesis of this interesting, important and educative book Eating Ethically by Jonathan K.Crane published by Columbia University Press was born thanks to an article released in the NYT called Talmud and other diet Food. I found this reading brilliant.

Written with an original perspective this one more than to be a trip through food is a trip through...Eaters and what it means philosophically and religiously eating adding of course, who eaters are.

Not only: what it means eating ethically; eating is seen here as respect for ourselves as you will read.
Too often we are not good eaters remarks mr Crane.
He calls this mental  approach maladaptive eating.

It's a problem. Also in the past gluttony was a problem treated by Aristotle before and St. Benedict of Nursia later. Benedict established rules and guidelines still followed. Two cooked dishes with fresh fruits and vegetables and some bread.
No one of these thinkers, Kant included mentioned, worried, the size of the body of a person; the size, fat or slim, was not important but the danger of a constant abuse of food was considered immoral.

That doesn't mean that if a person is invited somewhere shouldn't eat at all; the importance is the psychological daily approach with food and eating.

The author takes in consideration and I found interesting this section as well what happens in case of condition of deprivation of food in a body, like also what happens in case of a food-addicted body; both these conditions won't bring anything good for the body system.

Our body per decades was seen as a perfect machine compared to a car in needs of fuel for working properly, without any excess. If partially true, as remarks the author we can't classify our body just as a machine because also if we interrupt to introduce food in our body, our body can goes on. For a while.
So food as said by the author is not just our fuel.
"Food becomes our body that consumes and metabolizes it." An expression says: "We are what we eat" and it says all. There is a symbiotic relationship between us and our body and the food we ingest, who we are and what the food we eat let us become with the time. Let me add this.
Spinoza affirms that eating is both "Aesthetics as well as ethics."

There are various fields about eating, pretty interesting as food ethics is. In this case we will see how food is treated before to reach our...mouths. Another one involves diets.

Crane will also tell us what he loved to eat and what he appreciated and he still appreciates and what attracted him when he was a boy. Because going on our tastes changes for a reason or another.

Just in modern age there was consciousness also about the importance of keeping in good condition not just the stomach but also our intestine, the second brain of the organism and the one more stressed when sad facts occur in our existence and we can't find a way for keeping out our mental sadness.

It's important to eat well and it is not difficult after all: everything but with parsimony.
Helped by religion, the author will offer us various explanations about the eating's history seen also under a religious aspect.
One of the finals chapters will involve fats, salt, sweets and another one our relationship about eating and sharing our food with others. Sharing gives us meaning, when a person is starved, but also I would add,in normal conditions memories and good moments to remember and as added by the author, eating together is transformative. Crane adds: "To share a meal means to eat well, and conversely, to eat well  means to share meals."
Beautiful book because Crane has been in grade to give us a personal vision enriching it with philosophic, religious views, giving back to the reader an intelligent dialogue about what it means eating and who eaters are, offering to the readers a diversified meaning of who we are and how we can better ourselves  regarding eating, a common, normal, indispensable, vital daily activity for all men passing through the respect for ourselves, our body and the other ones, remembering to be socials and giving importance to quality and...quantities.


Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori