Inside Jacket

Edmund Morris, the author of three Theodore Roosevelt biographies, on what Teddy would make of twenty-first-century America.

All is not lost: what President Obama might learn from the Book of Job.

Is it O.K. or okay? Roy Blount, Jr., reviews Allan Metcalf’s “OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word.”

In his new book, Pope Benedict XVI says that condom use might be justified for male prostitutes seeking to prevent the spread of disease.

Literary boozing: where writers like to drink.

Salman Rushdie’s favorite fantasy books.

Why do cookbook authors so often underestimate the time it takes to prepare a meal?

Move over, Shakespeare: how the King James Bible shaped the English language.

Save a tree: a holiday gift guide for rainforest-friendly books.

Are video games the future of journalism?

An entry in the Book Bench’s ongoing book-buying guide.

If you’re like me, you know at least one person who reads cookbooks like novels, following the transformations of clarifying butter or simmering broth with the kind of fervor usually reserved for twists of plot. For the foodie who thinks of canapés as literary characters, “The Essential New York Times Cookbook,” by Amanda Hesser, is a sturdy choice this holiday season. Hesser’s book is more than a rehash of Craig Claiborne’s (equally essential, it must be said) “New York Times Cookbook,” of fifty years ago. Although Claiborne’s fingerprints are in evidence, Hesser’s project is an encyclopedic compendium of American culinary history—as she writes, “a fever chart of culinary passions.” Drawing on one hundred and fifty years of recipes that ran in the Times, Hesser—a food writer and editor at the paper—charts the progression of American taste from the nineteenth century, when dishes like Mary Lincoln’s Horseradish Sauce (”presumably conceived before she lost her mind,” Hesser writes) were all the rage, to the everything-in-aspic nineteen-fifties to the dried-cranberries-in-salads nineties to today. With over a thousand enticing recipes, presented in chronological order and according to type of dish, the book is a perfect reference for that friend who not only loves to make food but loves to read about it, too.

As book clubs have increased in ubiquity over the past decade, so too have the culinary demands placed upon the book-club host. Clubs have become nearly as much about food as they are about books, and the food must often submit to the book’s themes. If your book-club friend often finds herself wondering things like, “What drink says ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ best?” give her a copy of “The Book Club Cookbook,” by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp. The cookbook pairs recipes with a hundred popular book-club selections, like “My Antonia” (Spiced Plum Kolaches) and “The Life of Pi” (Tandoori Shrimp), along with a profile of the book clubs that recommended each book, and a discussion of the role of food in the story. Some of the recipes are drawn from dishes described in the books, and many of the authors contribute essays on the meaning of food in their work, making this a great reference for any literary food-lover. And for “Love in the Time of Cholera”? Definitely mojitos.

We have always prized succinctness and brevity. From Sophocles (”A short saying often contains much wisdom”) to Twain (”I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead”) and even Dorothy Parker (”Brevity is the soul of lingerie”), our writers have praised concision. But recently—boosted perhaps by the ubiquity of advertising catch-phrases, pick-me-up punchlines, and sloganeering—our taste for compression has gone a little too far. In the last few years, the trend in publishing seems to favor everything in miniature. There are six-word stories and six-word memoirs, Hint Fiction and Flash Fiction, Twitter wit, Twitterature, Twisdom, even the Twitter Torah. Now, “Eat Tweet: A Twitter Cookbook” by Maureen Evans, has arrived. A typical entry looks something like this:

Sunchoke Velouté
Brown2T butter/onion&leekwt&garlc/sc sunchoke. Simmer +6c Stock/BqtGrni 20m.Rmv grni; puree+wtpep/1/3c crm.

Huh? It takes me longer to translate this squashed scrawl then it would to read a full recipe. Where’s the fun in that? I want a recipe that will explain to me, step by step, in excruciatingly specific detail, how to make a dish. The books contends it is “like Grandma’s favorite cookbooks, only more to the point!” Here is where I decided that too much precision can itself be opaque, the same way that one side of an acute angle is in fact oblique: this isn’t pointed, but pointless. On the front, Laurence Downs declares the book “deliciousness magically packed into the tiniest carry-on bag.” But literature is not a carry-on bag, nor is wisdom. These diminutive conceits remind me more of the mini bottles of water they dispense on airplanes—awfully cute, but they leave me thirsty.

(Image: Miniature Bread Being Cut by Stephanie Kilgast, via Flickr.)

Forget the stock market. With enough expertise, diligence, and patience, book collecting can be a stable, long-term investment.

J. K. Rowling is the first winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Prize, awarded in Andersen’s hometown of Odense, Denmark.

Books on wheels: the Harvard Book Store launches a bicycle delivery service.

At one time, university librarians chose academic journals based on content and quality; nowadays, online vendors make the decisions for them.

“Run, don’t walk” to the bookstore: Junot Díaz on Patrick Chamoiseau’s “Texaco” and other must-reads.

A new fourth-grade history textbook used in Virginia claims that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War. Scholars say it isn’t so.

Sticky, greasy, gastronomic chaos: on the perils of editing a cookbook.

The last lonely newsweekly: why Time needs Newsweek.

Which came first: cuneiform or hieroglyphics? A University of Chicago exhibit compares the world’s earliest writing systems.

“There are so many sports, let’s see… I could bowl, jump hurdles, or water ski”: the story behind the lost Dr. Seuss manuscript.

Vintage Classics will produce a series of books with 3-D covers.

A British judge refused to throw out a suit accusing J.K. Rowling of plagiarism.

“The ordeal is part of the commitment”: Philip Roth returns to the Newark of his boyhood.

Can books be compared to works of art?

An epic Victorian feast in honor of Fanny Farmer’s “Boston Cooking School Cookbook.”

It’s the zeitgeist: how tuition costs are driving students away from the humanities.

Simon Armitage has won the Keats-Shelley prize for his poem “The Present.”

Take a spin through fiction’s best bicycles.