Author:Joan Smith
In HUNGRY FOR YOU, Joan Smith turns her attention to this infinitely intriguing. A collection of her own sharp, funny and stimulating essays on our attitudes to food and eating is accompanied and amplified by a fascinating selection of extracts from novels, tracts, songs, self-help books, poetry and biography. Her essays look at cannibalism and the strange imagination of the man-eating serial killers; at the politics of starvation and anorexia; at sexual 'appetite'; at taboos, and the connection between the stricture of Leviticus and the regimes of Rosemary Conley. Each essay is followed by a series of extracts: from Piers Paul Read's chilling account of cannibalism to Nora Ephron on the comforts of mashed potatoes; from the Princess of Wales talking about bulimia to Proust's voluptuous appreciation of the shape and colour of asparagus, and gems from Catullus, Madonna, Swift, Brian Keenan, Freud, and Lorrie.
John Pilger is the antidote to easy, comfortable thinking, to smugness, to ignorance. He is necessary
—— Daily TelegraphPilger has a gift for finding the image, the instant, that reveals all. He is a photographer using words instead of a camera
—— Salman RushdiePilger is the closest we have to the great correspondents of the 1930s. The truth in his hands is a weapon, to be picked up and used in the struggle against injustice
—— GuardianThis is a history book with a difference. It is imaginative in its approach, courageous in its execution and expansive in its sweep of interest...His approach is radical and interesting...It is a fine example of how a radically new point of departure can cast light on a range of areas over which the specialists will continue to do battle long into the future.
—— Sunday Business PostA meticulously researched work of scholarship, but is also a delightfully personal account of Dalby's year among the geisha. Geisha remains [Dalby's] best-known work and is the bible of geisha studies to this day
—— Times Literary SupplementPopular history in the best sense...its attention to human detail and its commanding prose call to mind the best work of Barbara Tuchman
—— Washington Post