Mirror For Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present Book

This book was one of my big disappointments so far this year, because I went in thinking I'd really like it and wound up so unimpressed that I think I actually hated it. The premise of the book is an interesting one, so interesting that I called my mother on the way back from the bookstore to tell her all about this new book I just picked up that I thought she'd really like! Barbara Kingsolver and her family have decided, for various environmental, political, and health reasons, to eat locally for a year and try and raise as much of their own produce and meat as they deemed feasible.

Kingsolver is a good writer and I've enjoyed Animal Dreams and The Bean Trees, so I assumed I would enjoy her adecdotes about her family's efforts to grow their own food supply. What I ended up with was an essayist trying relentlessly to convert me over to her point of view. America is bad, cooking your own food is good, be ashamed of your horrible non-food-cooking empty life. I'm exaggerating a little bit but not much. Over and over again Kingsolver relates large-scale problems in America (crime! addiction!) today to the fact that we no longer live close to our own food supplies. She has some valid points, but the holier-than-thou attitude ended up annoying me so much I couldn't make myself receptive to her message, and instead devoted myself to picking apart her examples. Also, it felt like there was a subtle sexism going on with regard to a woman's place in the home. Her husband may have made all the bread in their household but Kingsolver and her daughters were portrayed as doing most of the labor and cooking, and as one point she talks about the deep contentment she gets out of Thanksgiving, all the women in the kitchen working and gossiping together as they cook, all the men outside pretending they can throw around a pigskin. I think my favorite one, though, was when she said that women going into the workplace in the mid-20th Century was the reason why America's food culture devolved. There was this sense that, wow, America had just been so much better a hundred years ago, gosh, why can't we all just get back to that.

My new goal is go get everyone to read this book and find out if they hate it as much as I did.