A fun, crammed compendium on how this food became ubiquitous--like the apple in our diet. It's forms and functions are seemingly unending. You'll be surprised how much and in what ways you've consumed it. Stock photos, quotes, recipes, postcards: a loving scrapbook and historical tale of corn. If you're a cook, you'll love it. It's like a year of Gourmet magazine with every issue on a different facet of corn. A fun gift to give.

This book gives an excellent insight into the life and times of Mabel Normand - one of the first women of cinema. Her life was complex and peppered with tragedy. This book fully explores all the hearsay about Mabel's downfall, and looks further into the roots of the controversy surounding the Taylor murder case, amongst other scandals of her time. I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone.

All I can say is read this book. It is one of the best Bio's written about a silent Movie star.

Betty Fussell's book is one of the best biographies I've read. I've read it several times since it was published in 1992. Why, you ask? It doesn't begin with the usual chronological story, but jumps back and forth from the present to the past. Fussell interweaves Mabel's family, her nurse, her friends with the tragic outcome of Mabel's life. It reads like a detective story, as Fussell tries to capture the clues to Mabel's life . Get this one, you won't regret it.

Fussell's book is entertaining. Her chapter title can make you laugh out loud. I think she might be fun to have as a guest at a party, but that's as close as I would want to get to her.

In this book, Fussell recounts her life story -- leading up to her successful career writing about food. Mostly it's a story of how people did her wrong, from the wickedest of wicked stepmothers who readers could easily envision wielding an axe -- to her atrocious husband, Paul Fussell. Betty Fussell, according to her version of the story, has been surrounded by mean, vicious, cruel people whose main purpose in life was to smother her spirit. Even innocent bystanding neighbors and party guests are not spared her sniping.

The people are so unremittingly awful in her story, that I quit believing a word she had to say about them before I was half way through the book. However, it did get me to read Paul Fussell's memoir as an antidote. It truly was an antidote -- with greater honesty and integrity and more human kindness, compassion and decency.

This is a war story of a different sort where the warrior is a woman & the battleground is her kitchen. Her weapons evoke a lifetime's need to make dinner, love & war. Betty Fussell has pried open the past, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped & silenced by an era of domestic strife & global conflict, the Elysian Fields between World War II & Vietnam.

Fast, frantic & often tartly funny, where the author will snap your funny bone & suck out the marrow even as she prepares you a satisfying feast!

This is a terrific memoir, intelligent and bitchy and gripping.