Performed with grace and care, Daniel Henning’s outstanding narration of this fine biography reveals, warts and all, the larger-than-life James Beard. The renowned chef—who was six foot three and 300 pounds— is considered the dean of American cookery. Henning narrates with intelligence at a good pace, and he gives the elegant prose its due. This is an audiobook filled with luscious descriptions of places, meals, and people. The author deftly handles the essential truth of Beard’s life: He rose to fame as a closeted gay man in homophobic postwar America. Beard became the nation’s most important food personality while shielding his sexuality. The final line of this excellent audiobook says it all: “There was so much that nobody knew.” A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard
Narrated by Daniel Henning
John BirdsallUnabridged — 14 hours, 47 minutes
The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard
Narrated by Daniel Henning
John BirdsallUnabridged — 14 hours, 47 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
Related collections and offers
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Overview
Informed by previously overlooked correspondence, years of archival research, and a close reading of everything Beard wrote, this majestic biography traces the emergence of personality in American food while reckoning with the outwardly gregarious Beard's own need for love and connection, arguing that Beard turned an unapologetic pursuit of pleasure into a new model for food authors and experts.
In stirring, novelistic detail, The Man Who Ate Too Much brings to life a towering figure, a man who still represents the best in eating and yet has never been fully understood-until now. This is biography of the highest order, a book about the rise of America's food written by the celebrated writer who fills in Beard's life with the color and meaning earlier generations were afraid to examine.
Editorial Reviews
★ 05/25/2020
Legendary cookbook author James Beard (1903–1985) remade the American palate while carefully hiding his homosexuality, according to this zesty biography. Food writer and cookbook author Birdsall (Hawker Fare) styles Beard the Walt Whitman of 20th-century cooking: he championed fresh, local, seasonal fare against processed and frozen foods, and pioneered New American cuisine by applying French cooking methods to simple American classics. (He invented the gourmet hamburger while running a hamburger stand in Nantucket in 1953, and wrote groundbreaking works on cocktail hors d’oeuvres and outdoor cooking.) In Birdsall’s colorful portrait, Beard is a larger-than-life figure with a six-foot-three-inch, 300-pound bulk, a charisma developed from theater training, and the Rabelaisian tag-line “‘I love to eat!’”; on the shadier side, he padded books with previously published recipes and plagiarized some from other authors. Birdsall highlights Beard’s homosexuality, which he kept closeted until late in life to avoid alienating mainstream readers while subtly negotiating the fraught gender politics of men in kitchens. Birdsall’s narrative offers a tangy portrait of the backstabbing world of post-WWII food writing along with vivid, novelistic evocations of Beard’s flavor experiences (“The ham was salty and pungent. Its smokiness and moldy specter would linger as the first taste of the coast”). The result is a rich, entertaining account of an essential tastemaker. Photos. (Oct.)
"The Man Who Ate Too Much is one of the finest biographies of recent memory and one of the best culinary biographies around. Consider it required reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations of modern American cooking."
"The Man Who Ate Too Much makes a fascinating and persuasive case that [James] Beard was brought to an idea of culinary Americanness by re-experiencing the American West."
"John Birdsall pens what could be the definitive biography of America’s best-known food personality and the national culinary landscape he shaped."
"John Birdsall is not a polite biographer, and I say this with admiration. In his new book, The Man Who Ate Too Much, he pokes and prods at Beard’s most tender places, his hidden traumas, his deepest insecurities. Birdsall gets to what’s often missing from the cheerful narrative of James Beard, shading in the face sketched on medals and vintage book covers — a man known chiefly as a gregarious entertainer, enormous in profile, appetite and knowledge."
"Food is a haven for Beard in even his lowest moments, and Birdsall, a lovely writer, honors that with delicate reconstructions of flavor."
"For the first time, Mr. Birdsall brings both scholarly research and a queer lens to Beard’s life, braiding the strands of privilege and pain, performance and anxiety, into an entirely new story."
"The food writer who, more than anyone else, inscribed the idea of an American cuisine, Beard was larger than the sum of his cookbooks and Birdsall brings him to vivid life here."
"Packed with sensory detail, The Man Who Ate Too Much is a magnificent tribute to a titan of American life, who taught us, through the coded – or universal – language of food, our inalienable right to the pursuit of pleasure."
"A marvel of narrative nonfiction that achieves for 20th-century gay history what Tom Wolfe did for aviation in The Right Stuff, a subjective and objective reconstruction of a neglected American subculture hiding in plain sight."
"Like the life of James Beard, this biography is big and beautiful, heartbreaking and true. It is the celebration that Beard deserves."
"Birdsall’s sentences have rhythm, too, and compress time and place so that a meal becomes a history... like the greediest of diners, I want more."
"It is fitting that John Birdsall should give this impossibly rich tribute to the gay father of modern American food culture, revealing that it’s not the food but the ingredients within that make the cook a legend. Savoir faire, shade, dish, yearning, hunger, and creative fire made the great James Beard and this joy of a biography possible…Foundational. Important. Indispensable and delectable queer food history at its finest."
"Beard was both a victim and a perpetrator of multiple erasures, which Birdsall records in meticulous detail… The story of Beard’s life invites us to recognize the violence that was done in the name of American cooking and expand our understanding of authenticity to include not only what’s on the plate but everything around it: the norms, prejudices, economic wounds, environmental traumas, and other social forces that go into the production of food and culinary authority. It’s a reminder that food is part of culture, and terroir not simply a matter of the soil."
★ 08/01/2020
After winning the James Beard Award for his essay "America, Your Food Is So Gay," Birdsall wondered how James Beard (1903–85) rose to become the beloved "dean of American food." This engaging biography sheds insight, and describes Beard's complicated life. Though Robert Clark's James Beard: A Biography revealed aspects of Beard's private life, Birdsall examines it more closely, placing it into historical context by recounting the oppression gay men faced at the time. Ever fearful of being outed, Beard habitually destroyed personal mementos, but Birdsall used published material and private letters, conducted personal interviews, scoured Beard's appointment books (complete with menu notes), and examined photographs to write this vivid, detailed biography. The well-balanced narrative describes both high points in Beard's life, such as his groundbreaking TV cooking show in 1946, as well as less celebratory topics, including his sometimes-ruthless ambition; battles with weight, loneliness, and depression; and Me Too moments. VERDICT Highly recommended, this book offers new insight into Beard's life and time. It also helps another generation of foodies appreciate how Beard shaped American cuisine and helps all of us better understand the struggles LGBQT people faced in the mid-20th century.—Bonnie Poquette, Milwaukee
Performed with grace and care, Daniel Henning’s outstanding narration of this fine biography reveals, warts and all, the larger-than-life James Beard. The renowned chef—who was six foot three and 300 pounds— is considered the dean of American cookery. Henning narrates with intelligence at a good pace, and he gives the elegant prose its due. This is an audiobook filled with luscious descriptions of places, meals, and people. The author deftly handles the essential truth of Beard’s life: He rose to fame as a closeted gay man in homophobic postwar America. Beard became the nation’s most important food personality while shielding his sexuality. The final line of this excellent audiobook says it all: “There was so much that nobody knew.” A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
★ 2020-05-29
The author of the groundbreaking article, “America, Your Food Is So Gay,” turns a sharp but sympathetic eye on the carefully closeted food writer who celebrated the glories of homegrown ingredients and down-home cooking decades before they were fashionable.
Born in Portland, Oregon, James Beard (1903-1985) told friends later in life that he’d known he was gay since he was 7. During his freshman year at Reed College, he was quietly expelled after being “caught in an act of oral indecency with a professor.” He spent a desultory decade or so trying to make it as an actor and finally hit his stride in New York, where he started a cocktail catering business with an acquaintance made through his prodigious socializing. In 1940, his first book, Hors D’Oeuvre and Canapés, With a Key to the Cocktail Party, began a lifelong tradition of not acknowledging collaborators or the sources of recipes that were sometimes lifted from others and, later in his career, reprinted from his earlier books. What sold even the most mediocre of his books was his larger-than-life personality: “playful and unabashedly queer,” Birdsall notes, but only to those in the know. For average Americans, Beard was simply someone who demystified cooking and invited them to enjoy food as he did. The author’s well-written and knowledgeable text doesn’t scant Beard’s cooking and eating—indeed, luscious descriptions of memorable meals make this an appetite-arousing read—but its major secondary theme is the nature of gay life in midcentury America, where discretion was essential and discovery meant professional ruin and very likely jail. Birdsall’s analysis of Beard’s ambivalent reaction to the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969 is one of the book’s many intelligent passages decoding a worldview built on shame and secrecy, one that made Beard frequently unhappy and lonely despite his fame and success.
A thoughtful appreciation of a central figure in the story of American food culture.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176049879 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
| Publication date: | 01/26/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Videos
