Our Daily Bread - Books & Culture

re: Bill McKibben review of the book Good Bread is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It is Made, and the People Who Make It, by Steven Laurence Kaplan, Duke University Press, 2007: "...Alas, it is either badly written or badly translated (or both). The writing is often a parody of academic cluelessness ("Encoded both as a material object and a symbolic object, bread constituted a complex multiple register on which social, biological, and spiritual destinies operated simultaneously"). More fundamentally, the book never manages to provide a straightforward chronology of the story Kaplan is trying to tell, and hence manages to provide both endless repetition and frustrating gaps. But since, as I say, the material is potentially of great interest, I will try to reassemble the tale as best I can..."...