Hippie, by Barry Miles. Essential Works Limited, 2003

Covering seven years- 1965 through 1971- this book gives good picture of the main hippie era. Yes, hippies still exist, but these were the years when they flooded western culture with new music, new social movements, new clothing and new ways of living. Some of it wasn’t entirely new- the movement was rooted partly in the Beats of the 50s and in the intentional communities that went back some 100 years.

I really enjoyed this book; while I’ve read a good deal about the era, Miles really brought it to life. Pretty much every page has an illustration on it: photos, posters, ads. The main subjects are music and concerts, drugs, and protest movements. While “Hippie” is the title, the author also covers the Beats, the Black Power movement, Gay Pride, the Mods, and more. It’s all part of the era. I lived through the era, but I was a child and my exposure was limited to TV, radio, and magazines. This book made me wish I had been just a little older. I would have loved to have gone to a Be-In, a Dead or Joplin concert, seen the Merry Pranksters with their bus. This book isn’t just the pretty stuff, though. He exposes the meth and heroin use, the Hell’s Angels becoming an unwelcome force at concerts, the ODs and the VD, and all the ugly parts. Five stars.

A Medieval Book of Seasons, by Marie Collins & Virginia Davis. HarperCollins, 1992

This is a lovely book – over size but fairly thin. The authors take us through the seasons as described from writings and shown in art from the medieval period. It starts, appropriately enough, with spring, and works its way through the year. Every page has illustrations, all from the era (no modern drawings of what someone *thought* folks did back then).

Life was very different back then; except for the upper class, pretty much everyone engaged in manual labor, all year round. People worked when sunlight was available, and then probably dropped into sleep as soon as they hit the … well, what passed for beds. Spring was pretty much a celebration of having survived winter (a celebration with lots of hard work, but, still, it was a happy time).

The illustrations are beautiful; most come from Books of Hours and illuminated manuscripts. This is not a scholarly book, but one aimed to interest people in the period. The authors touch on a multitude of areas: food, agriculture, health ideas and treatments, leisure, and more. The illustrations also show what type of clothing was worn by the various classes.

A Short History of Drunkenness, by Mark Forsyth. Three Rivers Press, 2017

This is a brief, but fairly detailed, look at how alcohol has been used and regarded through the ages. From prehistory to America’s Prohibition, the 18 chapters tell us how alcohol has been used to see religious visions, to go to work, to end work, to discuss important issues and decisions, to communicate with their ancestors, and just about everything else. Most cultures have used alcohol, and it’s not limited to humans- naturally fermented fruit is enjoyed by both monkeys and elephants.

Forsyth’s prose is witty and irreverent, and a fast read; I read the 230 pages in two evenings- although it’s not a book that demands to be read at once; it’s one of those that you can put down and pick up again at any point. As nonfiction, it’s quite light. Sometimes the wit seems too much, as if he was afraid to write a sentence with no punchline, but all in all it’s very enjoyable. And he has done his homework and there’s a bibliography to prove it. So if you want to know who the Norse god of drunkenness was (it’s Odin) or how the gin craze started (it has to do with grain excesses), this is the book for you. Four stars. 

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Ritz & Escoffier: The Hotelier, the Chef & the Rise of the Leisure Class, by Luke Barr. Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2018

Cesar Ritz started his career as a waiter in Parisian restaurants. He worked his way up to better and better eateries, and finally made the step to being a hotel manager. He had an eye for improving things and a memory for what guests liked and didn’t like.

Auguste Escoffier was a brilliant chef, with equal skills in creating food and managing kitchens. When he started, kitchens were mad houses filled with yelling, drunkenness, food that arrived with some bits already cold and some hot, and very slow service. He and Ritz would find they worked together like a fine machine. When they took over the Savoy in London, the world of hotels and restaurants changed. They brought the running of hotels and restaurant kitchens to the level of fine art.

Before Ritz took over the Savoy, even expensive hotels had one communal bathroom per floor; he instituted en suite bathrooms. He insisted on modern plumbing and electric lighting (a new thing, just coming into use) and adopted the telephone for business use immediately. He filled the rooms and common areas with plants and flowers. He allowed anyone into the restaurant to dine, not just the aristocracy- unescorted women, actors, Jews, the nouveau riche, even ladies of dubious morals; basically, anyone who could afford evening dress. He and Escoffier worked together to produce over the top parties for people like the Prince of Wales, Escoffier producing new dishes for the guests of honor. Escoffier kept meticulous records of every menu and every recipe, eventually producing a massive cookbook that was the gold standard of French cooking for decades.

Eventually, however, the fact that they worked without close supervision caught up with them. They were accused by the hotel stockholders and owners of charging personal goods to the hotel, taking kickbacks from suppliers, and other monetary malfeasance. They were both fired promptly. It didn’t hurt for long, however- they went on to open the original Ritz hotel, the first hotel under his name.

It’s a fascinating look at social history at the turn of the 20^th century, a time of huge changes in both technology and social ways. Americans were marrying into the British aristocracy, new millionaires were appearing all over, people in the theater were becoming acceptable, and the British aristocracy was at the peak of their popularity. There are several menus from special events reproduced, but I would have liked to have seen some photos included in the book, and maybe a couple of recipes. There is very little given about the personal lives of the two men. Four and a half stars. 

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Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, by Kathryn Hughes. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, 2018

While the title sounds risqué, the book itself is not. While the book goes off on many tangents, the main focus is on five people- and, more specifically, specific parts of their bodies.

We start with Lady Flora’s belly. Lady Flora was a lady in waiting to Queen Victoria’s mother. Victoria and her mother were *not* close; the Duchess of Kent thought she and her ‘friend’, Sir John Conroy, should reign as regents for five years, even though Victoria had reached 18, the age of majority. Victoria would have none of that, and she pushed her mother away hard. When the unmarried Lady Flora’s belly begin to swell, it was another wedge between the two royal women. Flora swore she was a virgin, and, yet, her belly got even larger as she lost weight on the rest of her body. Flora was forced to undergo intimate examinations by physicians, who swore she was still a virgin. More than nine months passed. In any other situation, people would have accepted that Flora was desperately ill rather than pregnant, but this was the Victorian era and Victoria hated Flora. After her death, her family had an autopsy done, with numerous doctors present, to prove there was no child inside flora and that there never had been. Why was everyone so obsessed with this? I guess because they had no soap operas back then.

After that we have Charles Darwin’s beard (which wanders through how human females go about selecting acceptable mates), George Eliot’s hand (supposedly her right hand was significantly larger than her left, due to manual labor as a child in the family dairy), Fanny Cornforth’s mouth (a model for Dante Gabriel Rosseti as well as being his mistress-a role she played with many other men, too) that goes over prostitution in the Victorian era, and the tragic murder of little Fanny Adams, a child who was cut into pieces which were found strewn about a park.

It’s mostly a very interesting book- it’s full of information about the Victorian era, mostly focusing on how they thought about the fact that humans are animals with bodies that ached, pained, belched, farted, and could show what their lives were like. The author goes off on many tangents and most of them are fascinating (although some were less fascinating; hugely so). Some things still leave me puzzled; why did Eliot’s fans and family want to hide the fact that she had done manual labor as a young woman? (and, as it turns out, she hadn’t) It’s a book for the lovers of historical trivia. Four stars out of five.

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Dickens and Christmas, by Lucinda Hawksley. Pen and Sword History, 2017

Lucinda Hawksley is a direct descendant of Charles Dickens, so she is uniquely placed to write about his life. Her book relates an abbreviated biography of Dickens, with emphasis on how he himself celebrated Christmas, how England in general celebrated, and his works of fiction about Christmas.

A Christmas Carol is the one piece by Dickens that nearly everyone in the English speaking world knows. Even if they have never read it, pretty much everyone has seen one or more of the many film, TV, or cartoon versions. Everyone associates Dickens with Christmas, even more than they associate him with orphans and grim poverty. That didn’t start recently; it started as soon as he published Carol. He wrote four more Christmas stories, which cemented his position as the king of Christmas. The people of England came to expect his Christmas stories, which became a huge burden on him. He wanted to write other books, books that shined a light on the horrors of poverty. He solved the problem by creating a monthly magazine, and hired others to write stories for the Christmas edition.

Hawksley tells Dicken’s story in calm prose, and doesn’t spare him from examination. His childhood poverty, his perpetual money problems (most of them created by his large family), his marital problems, are all examined. I found it a very interesting look into his life. I also liked that the author related how the celebration of Christmas was changing, due both to the Industrial Revolution and Prince Albert’s bringing German customs over to England. Hawksley weaves all the strands together well. 

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