Reviews

5 stars for sure!!! It was a lot better than I expected it to be but luckily it mixed a lot of history with talking about the food each chef served and it was way more to it than just culinary talk. I love how the author separates and perfectly breaks apart the 5 different stories. This book is a hidden gem and I highly recommend it. A book about 20th century world history, genocide, revolutions and food. Who couldn't love reading about that??

fyodoralekseyev's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny informative sad medium-paced

4.0

Very interesting book.

enigma_squeaks's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny informative reflective fast-paced

4.25

notwaverly's review against another edition

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4.0

"We must allow them to tell their stories, and remember them just as they wish to be remembered." Read the rest of my notes for this, but I enjoyed this. I really love food writing, especially when it's woven in with politics (see: Black Sea by Caroline Eden? I think? As well as Julia Child's books). This one was very strange because of how humanizing it was. I read a lot of nonfiction history books, and giving straight facts about a dictatorial regime, it is very easy to feel distanced and wonder how anyone could have gone along with the power imbalances, how anyone would allow someone to amass a dictatorship's worth of power. But books like these re-center the humanity of the story. The people she interviews (cooks and other close service workers of dictators) have a human way of looking at another human, even when they acknowledge the evils of the regime. Showing the daily habits, the inconveniences, the childish behaviors, the food insecurities of dictators take them down off of the power pedestal for a second to examine the sides of them that aren't completely ruled by their relationship to power. (Which I think is a really important addition to political reading.)

Yeah, I liked this one a lot.

janniekesimons's review against another edition

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informative fast-paced

4.0

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