Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food Book

Here's what I gathered from this book: Growing up, John Haney ate a lot of food and also probably swallowed a thesaurus and too much James Joyce. Original, visceral descriptions -- particularly of food and people -- are always welcome and Haney does a good job of that, especially with the food. Run-on sentences that frequently come to more than 50 words and make heavy use of commas and parentheses are not. There were some sections, particularly toward the middle, where I thought if he varied his sentence length and broke up his long-winded paragraphs I might have liked the book more. In fact, I think that's why I liked the beginning and the end so much. Here, he breaks up his descriptions of his family with dialogue and it's refreshing.
Haney spends a lot of time in this book worrying about class issues -- if he's too snobbish to fit in with his East End working-class relatives, or if his Cockney pedigree makes him unworthy to mix with the more educated and rich. Maybe that's why he throws these great hunks of vocabulary at you. It's an effort to impress. But the more he does it, the less impressed you are.