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zhzhang's review against another edition
4.0
Some books are suitable for listening, well, I would say, this book is more for a copy in the hands to digest more vividly.
debbiecuddy's review against another edition
5.0
I just love to read EB White's essays and this collection was especially enjoyable. These essays were written between 1938 and 1943 and gave an idea of what life was like in rural America during the early years of the war. My dad grew up on a small farm in upstate NY and so many of these essays reminded me of stories my dad would tell about this time. This is a book I will dip into and read over and over again.
caroparr's review against another edition
4.0
Essays first published between 1938 and 1944 interpose musings about war and patriotism with notes on daily farm chores. For example:
And some gorgeous descriptions of the natural world, this from an evening spent training a puppy to tree a raccoon:
The passionate love of Americans for their America will have a lot to do with winning the war. It is an odd thing though: the very patriotism on which we now rely is the thing that must eventually be in part relinquished if the world is ever to find a lasting peace and an end to these butcheries...Yet all the time I know that this very loyalty,
this feeling of being part of a special place, this respect for one's native scene--I know that such emotions have had a big part in the world's wars. Who is there big enough to love the whole planet? We must find such people for the next society.
And some gorgeous descriptions of the natural world, this from an evening spent training a puppy to tree a raccoon:
After midnight we moved into easier country about ten miles away. Here the going was better--old fields and orchards, where the little wild apples lay in thick clusters under the trees. Old stone walls ran into the woods, and now and then there would be an empty barn as a ghostly landmark. The night grew frosty and the ground underfoot was slippery with rime. The bare birches wore the stars on their fingers, and the world rolled seductively, a dark symphony of brooding groves and plains. Things had gone well, and everyone was content just to be out in the small hours, following the musical directions of a wise and busy dog.
clellman's review against another edition
EB White is observant, wise, and funny, yet unpretentious.
jmiae's review against another edition
5.0
I never used to be a fan of essays. Maybe because in school I found the writing of them to be such a cumbersome and straining activity, I assumed reading them would have a similar effect. But after reading Ex Libris, The Library at Night, A History of Reading, Essays of Elia, and a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head, I've been thoroughly convinced that, so long as the topic is romantic enough for me, essays can be just as, if not even more enjoyable than reading fiction.
I loved this collection. Some of it was hard for me to keep track of, such as when he goes in-depth into the logistics of farming. But the sentiment behind it, and his arguments regarding the benefits of travel by horse rather than automobile, consolidated schoolhouses rather than one-room schoolhouses, the necessity of people being directly involved in food production and farming... so much of what E.B. White writes about the late 1930s and early 1940s resonates with my own way of thinking.
It'd be easy enough to write a paragraph expounding the virtues of every single essay, so I'll stop myself here except to say that this is one of those books that I want to take with me on holiday to some northeast American lake in midsummer and read without interruptions from the outside, modern world. Or perhaps Vermont in the autumn? Or better yet, White's saltwater farm.
I loved this collection. Some of it was hard for me to keep track of, such as when he goes in-depth into the logistics of farming. But the sentiment behind it, and his arguments regarding the benefits of travel by horse rather than automobile, consolidated schoolhouses rather than one-room schoolhouses, the necessity of people being directly involved in food production and farming... so much of what E.B. White writes about the late 1930s and early 1940s resonates with my own way of thinking.
It'd be easy enough to write a paragraph expounding the virtues of every single essay, so I'll stop myself here except to say that this is one of those books that I want to take with me on holiday to some northeast American lake in midsummer and read without interruptions from the outside, modern world. Or perhaps Vermont in the autumn? Or better yet, White's saltwater farm.
knitter22's review against another edition
5.0
If ever I was to meet my soul-mate in book form, I believe it would be E.B. White's One Man's Meat. While reading this collection of his essays written between 1938 and 1943, I was continually struck by how White's personal recountings of his daily life and thoughts could be so applicable to me, a 59-year-old woman living her life 70 plus years later. White writes with thoughtfulness, insight, wit, and humor about roofing his barn while war looms, bringing a cow home after his personal probationary period practicing on sheep, and the bittersweet experience of taking his son to fish at the lake where he had fished with his own father.
His essays aren't just personal musings; White also intertwines world politics and the dreadful feelings of fear leading up to World War II. He is one of the very few authors I have read that can combine both the internal personal and the world outside with his spare, honest writing and perfect word choices. In addition to the painful reminders of dark times such as "I keep forgetting that soldiers are so young," there are also delightfully prescient glimpses into the possible beginnings of Charlotte's Web with White's observations about rats, geese, and runt piglets. One Man's Meat is poignant, reasonable, clear, and one of the best books I have ever read.
His essays aren't just personal musings; White also intertwines world politics and the dreadful feelings of fear leading up to World War II. He is one of the very few authors I have read that can combine both the internal personal and the world outside with his spare, honest writing and perfect word choices. In addition to the painful reminders of dark times such as "I keep forgetting that soldiers are so young," there are also delightfully prescient glimpses into the possible beginnings of Charlotte's Web with White's observations about rats, geese, and runt piglets. One Man's Meat is poignant, reasonable, clear, and one of the best books I have ever read.
honeymonster's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.25
I love E.B. White's kids' books, so I thought I would be into this one, but I wasn't. Nothing about these essays grabbed me.
bjr2022's review against another edition
5.0
One Man’s Meat by E. B. White
For the last six days, I have been inhaling my mother’s 1944 edition of E. B. White’s volume of heavenly essays, written between 1938 and 1943 when White was both farming in Maine and doing his duty as a watchman to support the War effort.
My edition lacks a dust cover but has an inscription dated 10/27/45 from a long-dead friend to my now-dead mother, Edna, on the occasion of her twenty-fourth birthday. This browning tome has been on my shelf for decades. And when I finally took it down and began to read, I almost drowned in the accrued feelings: This book, this book is seventy-five years old. And I am wondering about all the hands that held it—from the printer’s to warehouse workers’ to bookstore clerks’ to my mother’s dear friend Tommy, to young, optimistic Edna, a budding writer, who—once we were both finally grown up enough to be friends—often mentioned E. B. White and kept this book through marriage, popped fantasy bubbles, and numerous dwellings. We never talked much about books, and although I remember her expressing reverence for White’s writing, in my arrogance, ignorance, and youth, I never thought to explore his work beyond Stuart Little, which was enough to make him my hero for life. (I didn’t see the need to read Charlotte’s Web until a few years ago when it beckoned from my top shelf and ended up being a driving force in my own novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg—so it was research. I blush at my oblivion.) Edna died in 1990 at age sixty-eight, the age I will turn in two days, and I want her back so we can talk: “I get it! I get it!” I cry. “If only I had known more when you were alive so we could share our love for Andy White.”
E. B. White was all of forty-four, or thereabouts, when he wrote these anthologized essays for Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker. A “personal record,” he calls it in the Foreword. “It is a collection of essays which I wrote from a salt water farm in Maine while engaged in trivial, peaceable pursuits” as an “over-age male” who was restless during the war. He was only a few years older than I was when my mother died, and yet he knew so much more than I ever will. He is a writer’s god and his voice is so vital that one senses him, as if both of you are hanging out in the 1940s, talking about farm animals in spring, barn building, and Hitler as a contemporary person of interest, and, although you may blanch at occasional casual linguistic racism, there is nothing at all awkward about this time jumping. In fact, White articulates the very sensation of normal time-jumping in a stunning essay, "Once More to the Lake," about feeling as if he were inhabiting his own father when he took his son to his own boyhood fishing haunt: "There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one—the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of." (248)
E. B. White is some writer!
Some quotes:
Included in these essays is one about the inundation of children’s books White suffered every year when his wife, writer and editor Katherine, received review copies of new books. He is funny and sarcastic, but also he is clearly studying them—interesting, because this book was compiled several years before Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web were even an idea. (Here is a letter to his editor about the true Charlotte who inspired Charlotte’s Web.)
This house, this house now held in Sunday’s fearful grip, is a hundred and twenty years old. I am wondering what Sabbaths it has known. Here where I sit, grandfather H. used to sit, they tell me—always right here. He would be surprised were he here this morning to note that the seams in the floor have opened wide from the dry heat of the furnace, revealing the accumulation of a century of dust and crumbs and trouble and giving quite a good view of the cellar. (46)
For the last six days, I have been inhaling my mother’s 1944 edition of E. B. White’s volume of heavenly essays, written between 1938 and 1943 when White was both farming in Maine and doing his duty as a watchman to support the War effort.
My edition lacks a dust cover but has an inscription dated 10/27/45 from a long-dead friend to my now-dead mother, Edna, on the occasion of her twenty-fourth birthday. This browning tome has been on my shelf for decades. And when I finally took it down and began to read, I almost drowned in the accrued feelings: This book, this book is seventy-five years old. And I am wondering about all the hands that held it—from the printer’s to warehouse workers’ to bookstore clerks’ to my mother’s dear friend Tommy, to young, optimistic Edna, a budding writer, who—once we were both finally grown up enough to be friends—often mentioned E. B. White and kept this book through marriage, popped fantasy bubbles, and numerous dwellings. We never talked much about books, and although I remember her expressing reverence for White’s writing, in my arrogance, ignorance, and youth, I never thought to explore his work beyond Stuart Little, which was enough to make him my hero for life. (I didn’t see the need to read Charlotte’s Web until a few years ago when it beckoned from my top shelf and ended up being a driving force in my own novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg—so it was research. I blush at my oblivion.) Edna died in 1990 at age sixty-eight, the age I will turn in two days, and I want her back so we can talk: “I get it! I get it!” I cry. “If only I had known more when you were alive so we could share our love for Andy White.”
E. B. White was all of forty-four, or thereabouts, when he wrote these anthologized essays for Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker. A “personal record,” he calls it in the Foreword. “It is a collection of essays which I wrote from a salt water farm in Maine while engaged in trivial, peaceable pursuits” as an “over-age male” who was restless during the war. He was only a few years older than I was when my mother died, and yet he knew so much more than I ever will. He is a writer’s god and his voice is so vital that one senses him, as if both of you are hanging out in the 1940s, talking about farm animals in spring, barn building, and Hitler as a contemporary person of interest, and, although you may blanch at occasional casual linguistic racism, there is nothing at all awkward about this time jumping. In fact, White articulates the very sensation of normal time-jumping in a stunning essay, "Once More to the Lake," about feeling as if he were inhabiting his own father when he took his son to his own boyhood fishing haunt: "There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one—the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of." (248)
E. B. White is some writer!
Some quotes:
[Regarding a writer who has sworn off writing anything that is not good and significant:] Having resolved to be nothing but significant, he is in a fair way to lose his effectiveness. A writer must believe in something, obviously, but he shouldn’t join a club. Letters flourish not when writers amalgamate, but when they are contemptuous of one another. (Poets are the most contemptuous of all the writing breeds, and in the long run the most exalted and influential.) Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or cinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. (43)Above two quotes written in January 1939
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom—he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. (43)
Monday. The cat, David, is lying beside me, a most unsatisfactory arrangement, as he gives me hay fever.April 1939
My sensitivity to cats defeats the whole purpose of a cat, which is to introduce a note of peace in a room. (60)
The cells of the body co-operate to make the man; the men co-operate to make the society. But there is a contradiction baffling to biologist and layman alike. On the same day last spring that I saw a flight of geese passing over on their way to the lonely lakes of the north (a co-operative formation suggesting a tactical advantage imitated by our air corps)—on that same day cannibalism broke out among my baby chicks and I observed the brutality with which the group will turn upon an individual, literally picking his guts out. This is the antithesis of co-operation—a contrariness not unobserved in our own circles. (I recently read of a member of an actors’ union biting another actor quite hard. I believe it was over some difference in the means of co-operation.) (89)July 1939
I just want to tell before I am slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose. (168)July 1940
In this spring of 1941 a man tends his [brooder—to keep chicks warm] fire in a trance that is all the deeper because of its dreamlike unreality, things being as they are in the world. I sometimes think I am crazy—everybody else fighting and dying or working for a cause or writing to his senator, and me looking after some Barred Rock chickens. But the land, and the creatures that go with it, are what is left that is good, and they are the authors of the book that I find worth reading; and anyway a man has to live according to his lights even if his lights are the red coals in the base of a firepot. (236)April 1941
[Right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor] To hold America in one's thoughts is like holding a love letter in one's hand—it has so special a meaning. Since I started writing this column snow has begun falling again; I sit in my room watching the re-enactment of this stagy old phenomenon outside the window. For this picture, for this privilege, this cameo of New England with snow falling, I would give everything. Yet all the time I know that this very loyalty, this feeling of being part of a special place, this respect for one's native scene—I know that such emotions have had a big part in the world's wars. Who is there big enough to love the whole planet? We must find such people for the next society. (276)December 1941
Thursday In time, ownership of property will probably carry with it certain obligations, over and above the obligation to pay the tax and keep the mortgage going. . . . [P]eople are beginning to suspect that the greatest freedom is not achieved by sheer irresponsibility. The earth is common ground and we are overlords, whether we hold title or not; gradually the idea is taking form that the land must be held in safekeeping, that one generation is to some extent responsible to the next, and that it is contrary to the public good to allow an individual merely because of his whims or his ambitions, to destroy almost beyond repair any part of the soil or the water or even the view. (333-334)So wrote E. B. White from his farm in Maine in November of 1942, as he made his contribution to the war effort, while simultaneously disparaging the buzz from the “ad men” who distorted the grueling reality.
The trend toward the ownership of land by fewer and fewer individuals is, it seems to me, a disastrous thing. For when too large a proportion of the populace is supporting itself by the indirections of trade and business and commerce and art and the million schemes of men in cities, then the complexity of society is likely to become so great as to destroy its equilibrium, and it will always be out of balance in some way. But if a considerable portion of the people are occupied wholly or partially in labors which directly supply them with many things which they want, or think they want, whether it be a sweet pea or a sour pickle, then the public poise will be a good deal harder to upset. (334)
The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people. The profits went to the few, the work went to the many. I think our phrase “common man” came to mean the man who never managed to get his hands on anything but a pay envelope, and sometimes not that. You became uncommon when you had capital to invest or an idea to develop. Usually you had neither, and were common as dirt. Profits flowed into closely guarded channels which led into a mysterious sea. (339)
Included in these essays is one about the inundation of children’s books White suffered every year when his wife, writer and editor Katherine, received review copies of new books. He is funny and sarcastic, but also he is clearly studying them—interesting, because this book was compiled several years before Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web were even an idea. (Here is a letter to his editor about the true Charlotte who inspired Charlotte’s Web.)