Michael Lesy

That this book ever wound up on a TBR list is an artifact of a time when food TV was an enthusiasm of mine, and anything involving Tony Bourdain was not to be missed. Having finally gotten to this book, I was initially not that impressed, as with a grab bag of chapters dealing with such topics as the period crusade for food purity, how working men and working women went about procuring food in public, and the plight of restaurant workers, the overall impact was that the parts were not aggregating into something greater.

Then, embedded in a chapter dealing with how dining out became an adventure for Americans, there is an account of Teddy Roosevelt publicly celebrating the American ideal in the company of a group of Hungarian Jews on February 14, 1905. The event itself was rather poignant, but at this point Lesy & Stoffer's real concern snaps into focus, as they are covering the beginning of an epoch of American eating that we are still in the throes of, and I finally found myself impressed.

That said, I'm still happy that I read "Three Squares" by Abigail Carroll and "Ten Restaurants that Changed America" by Paul Freedman before I got to this book.… (more)

A wonderful collection of documentary photographs from the Farm Security Administration, the same agency that sponsored the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. These photographs are so much more vivid than any attempts at fine art could be, while often achieving that status themselves. The past is made real here: not just farms, migrants, and poverty, but the ordinary life of people in cities or at leisure, including old people, adults in their prime, teenagers, and children. There's a feeling of spontaneity to many of these scenes that's quite remarkable for an age seventy years before the camera phone, when film was expensive and difficult to develop, and the cameras themselves were difficult to carry and set up. My mother was born in 1931, and this helped me understand the world into which she was born.

Lesy's text is unobtrusive, being fitted into its own sections between long stretches of photographs, and greatly illuminates the circumstances that led to the creation of these photos, and how after years of neglect they finally found their way into an archive. Highly recommended for lovers of 20th century American history and of street photography.… (more)