26.00 NIS
SKU: 9780802111166
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Margaret Visser
Eating is a strange phenomenon, if you think about it: to survive, we must kill and then incorporate other living things into ourselves. It is this basic strangeness with which Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner confronts us. "Eating is aggressive by nature," Visser writes, "the implements required for it could quickly become weapons." Table manners have thus evolved to keep our own rapaciousness in check. Winner of The International Association of Culinary Professionals' Literary Food Writing Award, the Jane Grigson Award, and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1991), The Rituals of Dinner continues the investigation of "the anthropology of everyday life" that Visser began in her first book, Much Depends on Dinner. She approaches her subject from diverse cultural and historical angles, and the book's organization reflects her own ravenous curiosity. Her travels range from ancient Greece to Papua New Guinea, and from cannibalism to cocktails.
Visser, with a doctorate in classics from the University of Toronto, is a serious scholar. But this best-selling author is also an accomplished stylist. Her greatest gift is for distilling information culled from an astounding range of sources--her bibliography is 30 pages long!--to produce prose that is not only thought-provoking but also highly digestible. --Russell Prather
January 1, 1991 by Grove Pr
Tags:
1991,
All Products,
Contemporary,
Food,
History
