Reviews for Penny Lane: A History of Antique Mechanical Toy Banks

The average rating for Penny Lane: A History of Antique Mechanical Toy Banks based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-31 00:00:00 David Glista I finished this book, perhaps not ironically, at lunch this afternoon. I found it intriguing--particularly coming off my recent perusal of "Diets that Time Forgot," a BBC reality-television series that followed 9 dieters as they historically-reenacted both time period and diet fads of Victorian, Edwardian, and Roaring Twenties eras. It was fantastic--hence the desire to read this book. While I understand that dieting before industrialization was probably non-existent as food and food sources were not as easily accessible. In other words, people had less stable staples, so dieting was likely not a major concern. Coupled with a worldview of corpulence as opulence, this view of diet is partly owed to fashion, as well. At the same time, I won't deny that I was disappointed that this book only spanned about 200 years of dieting history. At least it starts off with a diet that reared its head in Maine. Comfort food, that. I was most intrigued by the feminist lens through which Schwartz viewed dieting and its clear relationship to women's fashion. I was riveted by the story of the Bloomer costume, The Water Cure, and of course, Dr. Mitchell's Rest Cure (so familiar to me from my years of teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"). Much of her lens, however, is critical of diets of our past and it is clear that she is also viewing the entire subject through another lens: that lens being an overweight person (which she announces several times in the book). At the same time, I found none of that distracting. In fact, her style is engagin and, as I'd hoped, made history fun!

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-09 00:00:00 Betsy Prestis Obsession with physical appearance and neurosis about food is not just a modern day phenomenon. I liked the end chapter the best when the author describes a world without fat stigma. It’s written in “acedemese” as opposed to plain English