Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

分类: 图书,进口原版,Biographies & Memoirs(传记与自传),Historical(历史人物),
品牌: Mark Kurlansky
基本信息出版社:Doubleday (2012年5月8日)精装:272页正文语种:英语ISBN:0385527055条形码:9780385527057商品重量:476 gASIN:0385527055您想告诉我们您发现了更低的价格?
商品描述内容简介
Break out the TV dinners! From the author who gave usCod,Salt, and other informative bestsellers, the first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.媒体推荐Advance Praise forBirdseye:
"Kurlansky’s narrative gifts shine through every chapter."—Booklist
"Yes, the frozen-food guy really was named Clarence Birdseye (1886–1956), and the story of his adventures is another satisfying dish from the remarkable menu of the author of Cod(1997),Salt(2002) and other treats.
Kurlansky...places Birdseye in the same category as Thomas Edison: amateurs who got curious about a problem, played around with it (sometimes for years) and eventually figured it out. Birdseye had many more interests than frozen foods, writes the author; he invented, among other things, a kind of light bulb and even a whaling harpoon. He also grew up in a world that seemed to have limitless resources—no worries about plundering the planet. He killed creatures with abandon for decades, many of which he enjoyed eating, including field mice, chipmunks and porcupine. His curiosity also made him fearless. He conducted field research on Rocky Mountain spotted fever (collecting thousands of ticks), and he lived in the frigid Labrador region of Canada (and took his equally fearless wife and their infant). It was in the North that he began to wonder why foods frozen there—naturally—tasted so much better than the frozen foods back home. He discovered, of course, that it was quick-freezing at very cold temperatures that did the trick. He eventually invented the process that produced vast amounts of good frozen food, but then had to wait for the supporting infrastructure (transportation, storage, etc.).Kurlansky tells the exciting tale of Birdseye’s adventures, failures and successes (he became a multi-millionaire) and his family, and he also offers engaging snippets about Velveeta, dehydration and Grape-Nuts.
The author notes that Birdseye knew that curiosity is “one essential ingredient” in a fulfilling life; it is a quality that grateful readers also discover in each of Kurlansky’s books."—Kirkus Reviews(starred)
Praise for Mark Kurlansky:
The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell
“Part treatise, part miscellany, unfailingly entertaining.”
—William Grimes,The New York Times
“Fascinating stuff . . . Kurlansky has a keen eye for odd facts and natural detail.”
—The Wall Street Journal
1968: The Year That Rocked the World
“Splendid . . . Evocative . . . No one before Kurlansky has managed to evoke so rich a set of experiences in so many different places—and to keep the story humming.”
—Michael Kazin,Chicago Tribune
“Highly readable . . . A rich perspective . . . Kurlansky is a writer of remarkable talents and interests.”
—Walter Truett Anderson,San Francisco Chronicle
Salt
“Kurlansky finds the world in a grain of salt . . . Fascination and surprise regularly erupt from the detail.”
—Edward Rothstein,The New York Times Book Review
“Kurlansky continues to prove himself remarkably adept at taking a most unlikely candidate and telling its tale with epic grandeur.”
—Merle Rubin,Los Angeles Times
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
“Every once in a while a writer of particular skill takes a fresh, seemingly improbable idea and turns out a book of pure delight. Such is the case of Mark Kurlansky and the codfish.”
—David McCullough
“An elegant brief history . . . Related with fast brio and wit.”
—Anne Mendelson,Los Angeles Times