Winter’s Bone

Directed by Debra Granik
Roadside Attractions



In my review of 2009’s Oscar-nominated film Precious I stated that it was incredibly difficult to objectively review the film because the realism that is presented is so detached from my own circumstances. After seeing Debra Granik’s gritty Winter’s Bone I find myself faced with a similar conundrum, although not to such an extreme.

For people living in the rural areas of the Ozark mountains a fulfilled life is not one of luxury. The goal for an individual is simply to survive rather than thrive in the harsh natural and social environment. The world presented in Granik’s dark thriller seems desolate and cold, but through the female protagonist it manages to glimmer with hope. Brilliantly filmed against the poetic landscapes of the Ozark mountains, Winter’s Bone is a glimpse into rural morality and the emergence of an unlikely hero.

Relative newcomer Jennifer Lawrence is a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination for her performance as Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old with a lot of responsibility. She is the chief caregiver of her two younger siblings, she lives with her nearly catatonic mother, and she only occasionally shows up for school. Her meth-dealing father has been arrested, posted the family’s house as bail, and vanished. If he does not show up at court, the family will lose their house and be thrown into a world where they have more enemies than friends.

The narrative is essentially straight forward, which allows Granik to lace the film with tension. Granik brilliantly proves that action does not equal tension and most scenes start and end on high notes with an anticipated release that never comes. At its heart, Winter’s Bone is a film noir with a missing person chase, a look into an underground crime world, and a feeling of constant danger. Lawrence successfully creates a new feminist hero that also harkens back to the great noir detectives of the 1940s.

In a low populated area like the rural Ozarks, the morality that is presented does not fit the mold that urban and suburban dwellers have become accustomed to. When a significant portion of the workforce consists of unskilled laborers, the job market is incredibly volatile. In one scene Ree sees her only two possible futures in two separate school rooms: join the army and escape or become a mother and join her miserable relatives.

Nobody appears content with their existence in Winter’s Bone except for the children who only appear in the film in brief segments where they can be seen jumping on a trampoline or playing in hay. The fact that the children get such joy out of such meager circumstances shows that Ree’s fight is worth it.

Review by Alex Carlson

Cross-posted from Film Misery

Tea on the Axis of Evil

Directed by Jean Marie Offenbacher
Reorient Films



After two years of providing security intelligence about the activities of Al Qaeda to the United States government in the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration publicly dubbed Syria a threat to democracy by including it in the so-called Axis of Evil. Knowing very little about the secular republic, filmmaker Jean Marie Offenbacher decided to spend a year in Damascus in order to offer a look at everyday citizens of Syria and combat stereotypical depictions put forth in the mainstream media.

Though the U.S. Embassy warned the director that Syrian folks would be too afraid to talk to her, Offenbacher found enough subjects to fill the hour-long film. She highlights the stories of a few Bedouin people, the family of a taxi driver, and a couple of impressively quintilingual teenage boys who sell rugs at a souq in Aleppo, but the film focuses on people most Americans will find quite palatable: liberal, middle-class, educated Syrians who speak English and whose lifestyles mimic those in the Western world. There are several students of literature, sociology, and journalism, as well as a fashion designer, an actress, a weaver, a painter, and a businesswoman. In an interview with New America Media, Offenbacher explains this choice by saying she chose people she believed Americans could identify with; unfortunately, tactic undercuts her claim of and desire for authenticity, as the film’s characters are hardly representative of the general population (Syria’s lower classes, political conservatives, and the religiously dogmatic are conspicuously absent from the interviews) and simply become a counter-stereotype themselves.

This bumble heightens the well-intended, if naïve, thesis of the film: Syrians are just like us! They dance to 50 Cent in pubs. They swoon over movie stars like Antonio Banderas. The women struggle with feeling beautiful, and with sexist double standards regarding female sexuality. They worry about how to balance the need for childcare with their demanding careers. They learn to reconcile their religious practices and beliefs with newly emerging desires. The version of Syria presented in Tea on the Axis of Evil is, indeed, very much like urban America, but just as one should not forget that urban America comprises more than latte-sipping, New York Times readers, it is equally necessary to understand that Syria is not America—nor should it be—and, in a film about countering false depictions, present the complex diversity of Syrians’ lived reality.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Originally published in Bitch Magazine

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language

By Aífe Murray
University of New Hampshire Press

The popular image of Emily Dickinson is that of an almost ghostly woman in white, secluding herself in an upstairs bedroom alone, but Maid as Muse's innovative approach shows her frequently in the kitchen. There, she is found stirring puddings, baking her famous gingerbread, and living on familiar terms with the household help. She shared her dreams and gossiped with her favorite maid, the Irish-born Margaret Maher, who Dickinson referred to as her dear Maggie.

Murray uses a wide range of documents, including maps, advertisements, letters, photographs, and oral history interviews with descendants of the Dickinson's domestic staff to recreate the material and intellectual milieu in which the poet wrote her celebrated works. Murray demonstrates that the quantity and quality of Emily's writing output—in letters and poems—varies with the presence and absence of reliable servants in the household. Only when there are competent people to help with the heavy load of housework that a nineteenth-century homestead requires is Emily able to find the time, the energy, and, most significant, the concentration to write at her best.

Furthermore, Murray shows that the servants' vernacular speech—often quite different from the staid Yankee rhythms of the poet's family and neighbors—influenced Emily's compositions. The poet herself quotes sayings in her letters by the Irish immigrant Mrs. Mack, for example, and notes how differently her maids pronounce certain English words. Emily's famous slant rhymes and staccato lines of poetry also have startling parallels to the reported conversations and personal letters of her staff.

Murray traces the contributions of Black, American Indian, and British-born servants to the life and work of Emily Dickinson. She points out the places where Emily revealed the prejudices of her times, the classism and racism, yet she also acknowledges how Emily managed to rise above those prejudices and see poor people and other outcasts as sympathetic human beings. This is an enormously rich book, impossible to summarize briefly, well worth exploring, not only by the many fans of Emily Dickinson's poetry, but anyone interested in cultural history and the development of American society.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Ilustrado

By Miguel Syjuco
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is the novel made for re-reading. There are continual twists and turns and questions about the nature of fiction writing that immediately attune one to the constructed nature of the textual landscape. Indeed, Ilustrado is a metafiction, as it involves a character by the name of Miguel, a writer living in New York who is researching the life of a Filipino expatriate writer named Crispin Salvador.

At the beginning of the novel, the readers discover that Crispin has died under mysterious circumstances. Miguel, having been acquainted with and impressed by Salvador’s work and life, goes about trying to find out what might have happened to Salvador, especially as he embarks on writing Salvador’s life story. The novel is written with this main storyline, but scattered throughout are excerpts from Salvador’s many creative writings, both fictional and nonfictional in scope. There are also various interviews and blog excerpts that continually provide more context and more complexity to Crispin Salvador.

The other major narrative involves Miguel’s own life, one marked by the tragic and premature death of both his mother and father. Miguel and his many siblings are raised by his grandparents. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the novel takes us to the Philippines where Miguel is both haunted by the tensions that have disintegrated his family and looks to discovering more about his esteemed Crispin Salvador.

The title of Miguel’s novel, comes from the Filipino elite that traveled to Europe in the late nineteenth century in order to receive an education. In this regard, the “enlightened ones” speaks to the complicated ways in which the colonial subject could continue to be indoctrinated by the cultural capital devised out of the imperial enterprise. Nevertheless, the education that the ilustrados received also helped foment the revolutionary ideals espoused by those such as Jose Rizal. In this way, the novel is distinctly postcolonial in character inasmuch as it might be called Asian American.

Following Crispin’s life through the eyes of Miguel’s work and by other creative excerpts, the novel does track an impressive array of historical changes that have typified the Philippines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crispin, having been raised in affluence, must come to terms with his class background and finds himself using writing as a venue to share his political sentiments. The hope for the venue of writing as a direct instigator of political activism is a vexed issue throughout the novel and we can see that Syjuco is tarrying with the complex ways in which representation, referent, and social protest collide. Miguel, too, comes from a clearly privileged background and all throughout the novel we see the ways in which class stratification details the Manila landscape that becomes a sort of “third” character.

Like the recently reviewed, A Thread of Sky, Syjuco excels at painting a picture of modern metropolitan Manila in all of its intricacies and these urbanscapes become the terrain upon which power and difference can be situated. As the plot moves directly into the homes and lives of individual characters, we see, for instance, the way in which the domestic workers are subordinated and often times flagrantly abused. In the clubscapes, individuals worry about the latest fashions and where to score a round of drugs. The profligacy of the Manila elite is meant to destabilize any deterministic trajectory of the country’s progressivism. In addition, the political ruling class is also portrayed as corrupt and ineffectual. In this general space of guarded pessimism, the novel begins to turn inward with a major shift in the conclusion that queries the entire nature of the narrative trajectory itself. It begs the question about the construction of the modern Filipino/American subject, and he or she has come to exist at hazy boundary between fantasy and reality.

Ilustrado is a consummately entertaining book, one that will have you immediately re-reading, spending more time on the many different threads that hold the book together.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Privilege: A Reader

Edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber
Westview Press

A historian once said that the more one can know about something, the more you can control it. Michel Foucault was specifically talking about the control of psychiatric patients, prison inmates, and people's sex lives, but we can certainly extend his thoughts to a plethora of other examples. What Foucault did not say, however, was how exposing and learning about power and dominance can lead to their dismantling.

After more than two decades since his passing, the inheritors of Foucault's ideas make an appearance in a handsome new book that explores the invisible power of privilege; namely the privilege of being White, heterosexual, and middle class in America. Privilege: A Reader is a collection of essays compiled and edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, both scholarly experts in masculinities and ethnic studies respectively. The book takes on a welcoming and accessible feel with essays that come a personal place, many written from a first-person perspective by heavyweights like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Tim Wise.

Some, like Allan Bérubé's experience as a gay rights activist brings to light the complications of being White in anti-racist gay rights movement. Not being White, I found Bérubé's angst about pointing out the Whiteness of influential gay groups in the U.S. an eyeopener. For White people, it seems, it was convenient to remain racially invisible and to depend on the unspoken rules about keeping that Whiteness unchecked. Awkward silences, defensiveness, and hostility form the repertoire of White discomfort when the racial gaze is turned to Whiteness.

In Michael A. Messner's piece on "Becoming 100 Percent Straight," he raises questions that heterosexual people rarely ask: how do we know for sure we're straight? And what made us straight? Messner's question is interwoven in a study of his own sexuality that touches on his memories as a young man who was infatuated with a male classmate and friend. In repressing this infatuation, he belittles and rejects his friend—a process Messner calls the heterosexualisation of his masculinity.

With every chapter I am reminded of the discomfort the topic of privilege raises and how important that it should remain unsettling. I learn that Black men and working class White people, as privileged groups, are highly contested categories in the face of institutional racism and poverty. And dishearteningly, I discover that the gateway to social mobility undermined by the unearned privilege of being accepted to Ivy League colleges by virtue of having parents who are alumni.

Kimmel and Ferber's book takes us on a journey of self-reflection, of deconstructing the power of invisibility, and asks us some difficult questions about our many roles in maintaining oppression. But it does not try leave us beset with racial or class guilt. Rather, it invites us to pursue, both on a theoretical and practical level, ways of recognising the overlapping nature of social privileges and overcoming differences in the name of solidarity against oppressions.

Though Privilege: A Reader could be a more comprehensive, far-reaching catalogue of dominance, both insidious and overt, if it had taken on board the narrative of privilege from other non-White experiences and interrogated what being able-bodied and cisgendered mean. The absence of trans, disabled, Asian, and Native American voices speaks, ironically, of Kimmel's and Ferber's privilege of omitting these important experiences that are key to dismantling the edifice of privilege.

I praise Privilege: A Reader nonetheless, for its courage to speak from a place that prefers to remain silent, for raising attention to a things that want to stay hidden, and its overall critique of life's many taken for granted experiences and “common sense.” I'm sure Foucault would be proud of that.

Review by Alicia Izharuddin

MILK - HERE Arts Center: New York, NY (5/1/2010)

Directed by Jessica Bauman

Emily DeVoti’s provocative two-act play, MILK, opens in a spare farmhouse kitchen. It’s 1984. Ronald Reagan has just been elected US president and local newscasters seem to have nothing good to report. Meg (played by Jordan Baker), a former mathematician who loves precision and order, and her husband Ben (Jon Krupp), a former investigative reporter, are sitting at the table and talking, but it’s the kind of tense conversation that can quickly turn from controlled anger to fierce argument.

Things are bad, very bad. A drought has made dairy production virtually impossible, and land that’s been in Meg’s family for centuries is now on the cusp of foreclosure. On top of this, their college-aged daughter—who is never seen but is referenced at key moments in the play—wants to be an actress and their fourteen-year-old son Matt (Noah Robbins) wants material things his parents cannot possibly afford: name-brand sneakers, CDs, a bedside color TV, and stylish clothes, among them. Worse, there’s a city slicker on the prowl, and he’s made no bones about wanting to “help” Meg and Ben ease their financial woes. Ben thinks it’s good idea, "a gift from God"; Meg doesn’t.

Ben wins.

By the time businessman James (Peter Bradbury) and his teenaged daughter, Veronica (Anna Kull), arrive on the scene—in a private plane, no less—things have deteriorated even further. But James couldn't care less about the family’s personal difficulties. Instead, he’s turning his managerial acumen to improving the farm’s productivity. Although he knows nothing about cows, he hatches a plan that, on paper, will foster unprecedented growth and save the day: importing “wild, hairy, horned” bulls to impregnate the many heifers dotting the pastoral landscape.

As you have probably guessed, things don’t pan out as James—or Ben or a reluctant Meg—expect. While the second act of the play is far weaker than the first, the excellent cast, including Caroline Baeumler as Auroch, a talking bovine the Program Notes describe as “quite possibly the last living wild cow,” briefly explore a number of evocative themes including monetary pressures; urban versus rural lifestyles; marital fidelity; self-sacrifice; coming of age; and the festering ache that often accompanies keeping silent about things that matter.

In fact, by the time Veronica tearfully confides her father’s secrets to Matt, the pathos is so intense that James instantly morphs into someone less repugnant. In the end, while we may revile Matt politically, DeVoti renders him a multidimensional personality who is deserving of compassion.

There are no easy answers in MILK. Indeed, as the world changes, some customs and practices inevitably become obsolete and are replaced by newer rituals and activities. The key is figuring out which pieces of cultural and personal history to retain and which to let go.

At one point, Meg looks into a bucket of unpasteurized milk and declares that “the pure stuff, it corrupts so easily.” Maybe so. MILK asks its viewers to think about what’s negotiable and what isn’t. Regardless of what is ultimately decided, one thing is certain: after watching this well-executed play, urban audiences will think about cows in a whole new way.

Review by Eleanor J. Bader

**MILK will be performed at the HERE Arts Center through May 22nd.

Photo of Jordan Baker and Carolyn Baeumler by Jim Baldassare

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

By Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Ruby C. Tapia
University of California Press

Surprise—it’s a real downer to read about prison. That glaringly obvious statement aside, Interrupted Life is quite an achievement. The book comprises eighty-seven pieces, which are written by scholars, activists, incarcerated women, and formerly incarcerated women and span breadth of generic types. There are poems, reflections, and essays; there are excerpts from research, a Bill of Rights, a United Nations Report; there are journal entries, excerpts from interviews, vocabulary lists, and letters to lovers. There are so many perspectives, experiences, reflections, assertions, and expressions that no one point of view is easily privileged, and the reader who may try to do so would have to try very hard to lump everything in this book into one picture of the "standard" incarcerated woman. This, of course, is one of the goals of this book: to resist readers' attempts to maintain a generalized view of who the incarcerated woman is or what she is like.

I admire the honesty of Ruby Tapia's introduction. She directly admits that any representation of incarcerated women—even of a single incarcerated woman—will necessarily fail to convey fully what her experience means to her and how it feels to her. Likewise, it will also fail to fully show how such a representation relates to the larger social, political, and economic problems of justice, the category of the "criminal," and the overwhelming homogeneity of economic class within prison populations. She insists that creating a representation of incarcerated women—even such a nuanced, heterogeneous representation as the book attempts—is still to reproduce the categorical violence done to incarcerated women by setting up a space in which "we" (non-incarcerated, non-criminal/criminalized readers) can take a leisurely look at "them"—"they" who exist outside of the laws that bind us into a group that can evaluate the criminalized other, who cannot evaluate us in ways that count.

Interrupted Life makes a provocative and accessible (if continually heartbreaking) book for the lay reader. The future professor in me can't help but imagine this book as a text for introductory level courses in philosophy, women's studies, multicultural studies, justice studies, political science, criminal justice, economics, or sociology. The readings are not too difficult for undergraduate students to understand and the many perspectives lend themselves to lessons in critical thinking. For advanced students, the readings in this book could challenge—or confirm—more highly theorized academic studies about justice, prisons, gender, and the experiences of incarceration.

Review by kristina grob

Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

By Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Duke University Press

Professor Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s newest monograph, Jungle Laboratories, is a telling history that unravels the transnational political economy of barbasco yam production in Mexico from its discovery to its use in the early medicalization of synthetic hormonal steroids that created the birth control pill. According to Laveaga, the developing country context of the Pill’s history was so successfully erased from history that even the “peasant” culture in Oaxaca has allegedly forgotten its own crucial role in one of the past century’s most important scientific breakthroughs. Part of what Marxist theorists would call the “false consciousness” of history is revealed in this book.

Although production of synthetic hormones in Mexico predated World War I, controlling the barbasco trade in the the early to mid-1970s became a national project for the Mexican government. After reading Jungle Laboratories, I got the sense that “making the pill” was part of a larger initiative of “making a nation” consisting of “biocitizens” who were not just part of elite scientific knowledge production but were also expected to self-regulate their own population growth as part of President Luis Echeverría’s vision of a new Mexico.

While women were targeted for birth control campaigns, “male campesinos were encouraged to read agrarian law and technical manuals to become better and more productive citizens.” It is clear from these examples that women were positioned as part of the "population problem" to be acted upon by policies, whereas men were seen as the future policymakers and the population empowered by educational campaigns. Although the author could have written a feminist analysis of the nationalist projects, she did not; this is my own feminist reading taken from separate examples in the text that were separated by almost a hundred pages in Laveaga's book.

In general, Laveaga could have drawn out more of a critical analysis. The introduction gave an anthropologist like me high hopes for the inclusion of social theories ranging from Nikolas Rose’s biocitizenship to Michael Taussig’s theories on the layering of history and the magic of the state. However, with the exception of a couple of mentions, the theoretical underpinnings to this story were almost invisible. Given its gripping narrative, and implications for social theories pulled from elsewhere, Laveaga’s book is a good buy for an undergraduate curriculum such as reproductive health and medical anthropology. It is also an engaging read for women who are curious about the political economy of the pills they are popping on a daily basis.

Review by Maya N. Vaughan-Smith

The Blue Orchard

By Jackson Taylor
Touchstone

I can't remember the last time a tale of fiction grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. I finished The Blue Orchard by Jackson Taylor over a week ago and it still haunts me during those quiet moments of my day. What drew me in to say 'yes' to reviewing this book was that it is a tale of a nurse in pre-Roe America who is arrested for performing illegal abortions. On top of that, The Blue Orchard is a fictionalized tale of Taylor's own grandmother.

But I have to tell you that I forgot that last fact while reading. I was so consumed by the ups and far too many downs of Verna Krone that I simply forgot she really did walk this earth. The Blue Orchard is a painful tale of a young girl's hope to find her place in the world, only to have too many decisions made for her that ultimately result in heartbreak. The story is far too delicate than I could ever express.

I will certainly be suggesting The Blue Orchard the next time my book group needs to pick a title. Not only is the issue of abortion discussed, but also gender roles, race, class, motherhood, and even a great dose of local politics. Oh, did I love the local politics angle!

Review by Veronica I. Arreola

Cross-posted from Viva La Feminista

Briarpatch Magazine: Responsibility to Protest (Jan/Feb 2010)

Turning through the pages of Briarpatch Magazine, I was offered a glimpse into Canada's progressive social movements. Reading the Responsibility to Protest issue, which is also available online, gave me a crash course in several progressive ideologies I wasn't familiar with, and I was able to explore some familiar issues that are close to my heart as well.

Briarpatch covers a lot of ground. The headline story, "Mass Protests & The Future of Convergence Activism" by Jane Kirby, gave me a crash course in what's happening on the streets of social activism while "From Invisibility to Stability: Transgender Organizing for the Masses" by Mandy Van Deven introduced me to the interplay between transgender issues and poverty. I work for a nonprofit that addresses the global water crisis, so "Water Fight: First Nations' Water Rights in the Thompson Okanagan" by Hannah Askew provided me with fresh insight into Canada's own water struggles.

Especially illuminating were the pages devoted to suggestions of how better to spend the $6.1 billion price tag of the recent Vancouver Olympic Games. "Boosters' Millions" by Dawn Paley & Isaac Oommen, offered solutions in education, transportation, and housing that could take British Columbia well beyond the entertainment value of the two-week games if the Canadian government would spend the public money on more sustainable initiatives. "Selling the Olympics in the Schools: Government & Anti-Olympics Groups Take Their Messages to the Classroom" by Jenn Hardy offered timely and relevant insight into another side of the Olympic Games. Needless to say, I got a lot out of this issue.

My favorite article, though, was about my favorite social issue: feminism. I could readily relate to "When We Were Feminists" because, as someone just entering her thirties, I often observe my own feminist ideas fading, changing, and even burning brighter as I move through different phases of my life. Author Penelope Hutchison looks back at her progression from a founding member of the Radical Obnoxious Fucking Feminists (ROFF) in her undergraduate days to a forty-something professional who recently reunited with ROFF's other members. Hutchison reveals that the once radical change-makers have mostly tucked their feminist ideologies away to pursue careers, relationships, and families.

The article made me question my belief that if I support the feminist issues I care about, and if I work hard to allow my feminism to be exemplified in my actions, then I will always be a feminist no matter what work I'm doing or what lifestyle I'm leading. It's difficult for me, at thirty-one years old, to imagine dampening my desire to improve the lives of women because I've recently gotten married or plan to have kids within the next couple of years. In ten years, I don't want to look back and wonder where my former feminist self has gone. I hope my role as a feminist activist can co-exist with my roles as nonprofit professional, wife, M.B.A., and mother.

Briarpatch Magazine did exactly what I was hoping it would. It gave me fresh perspective on issues I'm already familiar with, and it introduced me to new lines of thought and new ways to apply my social activism.

Review by Meg Rayford

The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society

By Janet A. Flammang
University of Illinois Press

At a time when Western society is becoming more and more dependent on cheap and rapid sustenance of often dubious nutritional value, Janet Flammang’s study is an important reminder of both the way it was and the way it perhaps should be. In The Taste for Civilization, Flammang sets out to present what she calls “table activities” as central to respect, citizenship, and a greater good. Inevitably (because of both the topic and her expertise in Women’s Studies), the author’s analysis explicitly and logically makes gender a key factor in this construction. This researcher’s previous book was an analysis of the importance of studying women’s movements at all levels in political science, entitled Women’s Political Voice: How Women are Transforming the Practice and Study of Politics. As politics evolve, the “politics of food” could be said to be what is being examined in this new work.

This attractive volume (the cover photo is especially lovely) is divided into five parts and thirteen chapters, including extensive notes, a bibliography, and a handy index. An historical analysis of meals and food preparation in (principally) the Western world is included, and Flammang shows demonstrates her extensive knowledge of a wide array of topics from ancient Greek philosophy, to the Enlightenment thinkers, anthropology, sociology, and modern psychological studies. Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Freud are all called upon in the text, whether it is to define society or to explain women’s role in the feeding process.

Flammang begins with the premise that “table activities” (in other words, “everyday food practices” or “mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining”) are central to socialization, and therefore tackles the conundrum of women’s shifting position in this activity (from traditional gender roles, for example) and the possible consequences on Western civilization (the end of communication, discussion, and consensus?). Naturally, the author does not pass judgment on women for their lack of investment in the rituals (enough do!), but rather examines this important social change as it presents itself and proposes possible solutions to this important shift in practice. Interestingly and importantly, the author also analyzes shifting “food practices” along racial and class lines in several chapters.

Flammang also draws the topic away from the domestic sphere and discusses food-related issues that are regional, national, and international. Her discussions of the effect on North American society of certain food stuffs, like the use of bleached white flour or processes such as canning, are intriguing. Along with testimonials from the general population, she includes cultural references to changes brought about by immigration, including the semantic importance of food for certain groups (e.g., “breaking bread”). In chapter ten, entitled “Delicious Revolution,” she examines Alice Water, California chef and cookbook author, who has also extended her revolutionary food philosophy to schools where she is a vocal advocate for healthy meals in schools for all children.

Surprisingly, Julia Child, is not mentioned explicitly by Flammang, despite having been again prominent in the media since the 2009 movie retracing certain aspects of her life. At times, the subtitles of the chapters are sometimes puzzling and the author cannot avoid a certain amount of repetition (French philosopher Brillat-Savarin seems to be a favourite). Despite these remarks, this thorough analysis is exceptionally well written, and of interest to anyone who has even a remote curiosity as to the link between food and civilization in Western society.

Review by Sophie M. Lavoie