RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWith loving care, Birdsall details the central irony of James’s life: it was his job to share gastronomic pleasure with the public, but he had to keep his own private desires out of sight ... Birdsall has established himself as our pioneering writer on the unacknowledged role played by closeted gay men in shaping America’s food culture ... Birdsall has done his research with enviable skill ... The most admirable food writing — including The Man Who Ate Too Much — reminds us that enjoying food starts with learning about our own tastes. Good food is the food that pleases us, be it new or familiar.
Colin Dickey
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... a thoughtful, searching book about people’s deep investment in unexplained phenomena ... forthright about its thesis and develops it further ... The point of Dickey’s journeying is never to prove eyewitnesses and believers wrong, although he acknowledges that he experienced nothing extraordinary himself during his travels. The point is to find out what drives the faithful ... By treating the iconography of the weird as an equal-opportunity bin of elements to be combined with postmodern abandon, the artist of the weird rebels against what passes for expertise in cryptid and UFO research. What results is a collage that cheerfully announces the meaninglessness of its subject.
Ben Katchor
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... a love letter to a vanished culinary world ... To write such a book – and to read it – demands sitzfleisch, literally, sitting-flesh ... quickly reveals itself as a roaming, curious study of many things: religion, diet, cooking, dining, socializing and philosophizing ... One great pleasure of this section is that Katchor reproduces some menus; another is that he documents not only restaurants but the lives of restaurateurs, waiters, cooks and regulars, as well as a few luminaries.
