Short Takes
Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
By Stacy A. Cordery
Viking, 590 pp., illustrated, $32.95
Known for her statement "If you haven't got anything good to say about anyone come and sit by me," Alice Roosevelt Longworth maintained that her usual point of view was "detached malevolence." She cultivated this outrageous image through her long tenure as Washington's most endearing, irritating, and influential "princess."
She was a teenager when her father, Theodore Roosevelt, became president in 1901. Debutante, hostess, ambassador, and bride while her father was in the White House, she was comfortable around men in power. She married one, Nicholas Longworth, who became speaker of the House of Representatives and drank and chased women, and she loved another, William Borah, who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and by whom she bore her only child. She steadfastly supported Republican candidates, campaigned against the League of Nations, relentlessly opposed the New Deal of her cousin Franklin, and enjoyed the friendship of the Nixons. The pitiless precision of her wit combined with the astuteness of her political thought to make her a powerful and conspicuous presence from the 1920s until 1980. Stacy Cordery, using personal diaries and letters, creates a portrait rich in historical and personal detail but devoid of psychological insight or speculation.
The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food
By Judith Jones
Knopf, 304 pp., $24.95
Raised in a wealthy WASP household where the bland food of Fannie Farmer was the standard, Judith Jones rebelled by moving to Paris and eating unmentionable organ meats. Less scandalously, she lived openly with her lover, later her husband. Delighting in the pleasures of the table, she developed into a sophisticated and influential editor of cookbooks. As an editor at Knopf, she discovered and developed cookbooks by Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Edna Lewis, and Madhur Jaffrey, among others. She had a keen eye for writers who provided clear and engaging explanations for why a dish needed to be prepared in a certain way, and how to do it. Jones immediately recognized the appeal of Julia Child, and in 1961, when French cooking was still too daunting for most American cooks to attempt, came up with the encouraging title "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Although not a cookbook writer herself, she concludes her memoir with helpful recipes for most of the dishes she mentions, from Aunt Marion's Ham Timbales and Schrafft's Butterscotch Cookies to Brains with a Mustard Coating and Sauteed Duck Breast with Madeira à la Julia.
Jones was particularly clever in helping an author find a voice on the page, but her own voice here is constrained by the good manners she was raised to respect. Despite her freedom in the market, the kitchen, and at the table, in these pages she often sounds a bit like Fannie Farmer.
Love and Language
By Ilan Stavans with Verónica Albin
Yale University, 261 pp., $25
Professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College and cultural critic at large, Ilan Stavans explores the nature and expression of love in a series of Socratic dialogues. Recognizing that "the absolute examination of an emotion, from all possible perspectives," is preposterous, he sets out to attempt it. He considers self-love, love of God, love of community. Often beginning with a dictionary definition, he explores depictions of love in dreams, wishes, poetry, paintings. He acknowledges that definitions of love are subjective and local, but he is unapologetically opinionated and extensively learned. He roams casually and familiarly through the Oxford English Dictionary, the Talmud, Greek mythology, and the works of Plato, Coleridge, Borges, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Ambrose Bierce, and de Sade.
While accepting of most practices and perversions, he is curiously judgmental about pornography, "the result of solitude, depravation, despair," and appropriately cautious about the love of country. "Love's boundaries are deliberately unspecified. Ask a dozen people what love is, and you're likely to get a dozen different definitions." Here is one man's elaborate, illuminating, but inconclusive definition.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
