Crazy inthe KitchenFood, Feuds, and Forgivenessin an...

Crazy in

the Kitchen

Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness

in an Italian American Family

Louise DeSalvo

Bloomsbury: 260 pp., $24.95

Amazing how fondly one can remember Spam when one is dead set on romanticizing one’s past. Louise DeSalvo (myth debunker from way back, when she wrote about sexual abuse in Virginia Woolf’s upbringing) remembers the good and the bad, the burnt and the beautiful. Growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s, DeSalvo watched her Southern Italian peasant grandmother berate and chastise her daughter, DeSalvo’s mother, who was much enamored of fast food and America in general. As an adult, DeSalvo traveled to Italy and learned that all was not bountiful. Part of the reason for her family’s emigration was poverty and starvation. Her grandmother’s naturalization was a terrible event: “Because my grandmother was not quite white, she was also thought to be not quite smart, not quite reliable, not quite capable of self-government.” DeSalvo is constantly torn between cooking and writing. “My hands are sticky,” she writes while making fig nut bread and writing this book; “my keyboard is sticky; my desk has a little film of flour on it.” Her bread dough sits next to her computer so she can keep an eye on it while she writes. Our best writers on food are either writers first and then cooks (M.F.K. Fisher) or cooks and then writers (Elizabeth David). DeSalvo can’t decide.

American Nomads

Travels With Lost Conquistadors,

Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians,

Hoboes, Truckers and Bullriders

Richard Grant

Grove Press: 312 pp., $24

How the English love our American West! In 1985, living in East London, Grant found himself drinking too much and “ranting in the pub.” He was “broke, unemployed, fresh out of university, hating just about everything English, and hating the weather with a special vehemence.” This guy was ripe for travel: “Walking to the dole office

Stories From

the City of God

Sketches and Chronicles of Rome,

1950-1966

Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated

from the Italian by Marina Harss

Handsel Books: 232 pp., $24

These postwar sketches of Rome, including several outlines for screenplays, were written by filmmaker Pasolini (1922-1975) for various journals, magazines and newspapers. In 1950, age 27, Pasolini left the northern countryside for Rome. He found himself living among the “underprivileged, peripheral, marginalized classes.” It was not this lifestyle but the creeping “gentrification” that finally prompted him to leave the city. Like Richard Grant, Pasolini is drawn to the city’s nomads: a boy who steals fish, in “The Dogfish”; “Trastevere Boy,” who sells chestnuts by the Garibaldi Bridge; or the protagonist of “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller.” Like Grant in his travels across the U.S., Pasolini “learn[s] the secrets of Rome through the language of its poorest inhabitants.”