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| A Short History of the American Stomach | 
 enlarge | Author: Frederick Kaufman
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $22.99 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 556586
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 015101194X
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.12
EAN: 9780151011940
ASIN: 015101194X
Publication Date: February 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 13 | | NEXT » |
 Tons of information, so hard to read July 12, 2008
I really wanted to like this book, having heard the author interviewed. But the writing is so ponderous, I just could not read this book. Here's a randomly selected sentence: "We see here the clinical ancestor of the much-dreaded, much-sensationalized antidigestive psychological plague of our own age, anorexia nervosa. We may feel superior to Mather's primitive descriptions of phlegmatic humours and angered constitutions, but the quest for the cure remains current."
Huh?
Which is what I kept thinking as I read.
Too bad. There is a ton of research here and lots of fascinating information about how our food habits came about. If only I could read it.
 There is a good book in this topic - this isn't it. May 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An extremely unfocused book. Kaufman has an excellent topic here, but does little with it. Like with Freakonomics, the book is a series of interesting tidbits that don't really add up to anything. Probably the most interesting thing I learned is that practically every food in America, except those including pork, is probably kosher, even if not supervised by a rabbi. There were some interesting tidbits about the Mather family, but why not go deeper into how their theories affected the average American?
There is a book to be written on this topic - this one isn't the right one. It merely skims the surface and isn't a coherent whole.
And don't let the length fool you. This is REALLY short. Without the index, it is 194 pages of the kind of type you see in young adult titles. I read this in about 2 hours, and I'm not a particularly fast reader.
I Want My Money Back May 17, 2008
Actually this was a gift but if the cover hadnt been creased I would have exchanged it.
Sounded promising but the writing was unreadable. Trying so hard to be clever but just pompous and overwritten, I couldnt make it past page 40. Sorry but bad books make me grumpy. Do Not Buy!
a mess May 14, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
American Stomach is a real mess. It's a rambling hodge-podge of ideas and topics as they occur (very randomly) to the author. The topics themselves have very little to them. It's mostly ruminations that are hard to follow, with very little meat. The author seems most intent on impressing the reader with his vocabulary, literary allusions, and cleverness. Transitions from one topic to another were particularly jarring and haphazard.
Here's a sample of what you can expect:
American religion, American economics, American politics, and American media had all been devoured by the great maw. At the Plymouth harvest dinner reenactment [the topic of the chapter], where nothing was real except the food, the primal, eldest origins of the country had met the American stomach and gone down the hatch too. And still, the enteric brain pushed forward. It wanted more.
Breezy, clever-sounding - but what does it all mean, if anything?
Maybe it was better in the magazine May 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm always curious what the word "short" in "short history" means. In the case of this book it seems to mean glib and superficial. Less a history of anything and more a series of unconnected food essays, the book is a disappointment in that it never delves too deeply into anything. It's all appetizer and no main dish, to appropriate a metaphor the author probably used several times in this thing. Some of the mini-essays are interesting, such as the ones about the Kosher food industry and genetic modification of fruit, but even these brief forays are so jokey and cursory the reader is left with more questions than are answered. On top of that, most of the jokes are worked over to the point that they've gone stale between the long set-ups and the anemic punch lines.
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