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Interviews | December 1, 2009

A Meaty Tale: The Powells.com Interview with Julie Powell

1 comment By Megan

Julie Powell charmed readers with Julie and Julia, in which she chronicled her quest to cook, in one year, every recipe out of Julia Child's... Continue »

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1. 
   $17.49 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

   Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

   Julie Powell

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stephen goranson, November 20, 2006

I am not finished reading--it's hard to know what finished would be--but I am sure this work deserves the full five stars. I started reading it straight through, but kept getting delightfully sidetracked, remembering another quotation, like an old acquaintance. The editors have done a tremendous amount of research, especially in tracking down many early attestations, especially for modern American texts. This is such a solid reference book that it can't hurt to note that there is no Platonic ideal collection. Though what's included is massive and well-selected, part of the fun is to see what is absent too. Sure, I recall Jimmy Durante saying 'I got a million of 'em' (included), but I did not find his 'Everybody wants to get into the act' under his name. It turns out that it is included, but listed under Radio Catchphrases. I could have found the saying that I heard on TV in the keyword index, but a cross-reference at Durante would have been helpful. Though the front matter clearly delineates the format, one could question omitting known political speech writers credit in political quotations, for example, in Agnew's unhappy phrase 'nattering nabobs of negativism.' William Safire will be not amused. The evidence for attributing 'damned lies, and statistics' to Disraeli, rather than Courtney or another, seems to me rather questionable. For example, YBQ cites a 1895 statement of a letter writer who thought Disraeli said it, but in a 1894 book Price Collier attributed the saying to Walter Bagehot. Other quotations will, no doubt, be antedated, and some attributions reassigned, and presumably included in a revised edition. Absent: 'the whole nine yards.' This appeared in Vietnam GI slang in 1966. By then 'Montagnards' were slangily called ''yards.' In 1966 Navy Chaplain and anthropologist R. L. Mole published a book on Nine Tribes of Montagnards in I Corps area (the north of South Vietnam). To get all of them as allies, I suggest, gave rise to the phrase for the full compliment, the whole nine yards. But there is admittedly no consensus on this yet. As Saul Lieberman reportedly said in introducing G. Scholem's lectures on Kabbalah, 'Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense is scholarship.' (Though other tradents report that he said 'history,' not 'study.') In any case, this is a fine reference work.

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