The way we are

by Margaret Visser

Book Overview

From the celebrated author of The Rituals of Dinner and Much Depends on Dinner comes a new collection of witty and insightful essays. In The Way We Are Margaret Visser, a self-described... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0002554194
• ISBN13: 9780002554190
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

About the Book-

From Editorial Reviews, in hopes this may be helpful... The Way We Are: The Astonishing Anthropology of Everyday Life FROM THE CRITICS Katherine Whittemore: Montaigne and Emerson and Trillin may be great essayists, but they aren't verbs. "To visser," however, is the coinage of the realm for fans of Margaret Visser, the esteemed Toronto food writer. South African by way of the Sorbonne, ex-classics professor and essayist, since 1988, for the Canadian magazine Saturday Night, she has a singular attack. It's arch, quirky, far-ranging and pedagogic: Miss Jane Brodie meets Margaret Mead. The Way We Are includes 60 short pieces, each with a bibliographic chaser. A piece about spitting, for instance, primly lists ten sources, from Xenophon to Erasmus to an 1897 treatise entitled, The Saliva Superstition in Classical Literature. To visserize is to take the quotidian -- chewing gum, menus, gloves, stripes, the Easter Bunny -- and cast a little scholarly sunshine upon it. "I refuse to accept the ordinary as dull," Visser writes. Quite so. In her take on bells, we discover they were rung to "tell the townsfolk to cover their fires and retire for the night. (The word in French was couvre-feu, which becomes curfew in English.)" Or that men shake hands with their right hands because "it showed peace and benevolence: you had no intention of drawing your sword." Or that long ago, the wedding cake was broken over the bride's head. "This invoked fertility," writes Visser, "as where brides. . .are showered with rice, 'many small things,' signifying a fecund future." Visser's essays don't always delight for their prose alone -- she often becomes so dazzled by these info-jewels that she forgets to make her sentences gleam. (Her endings, in particular, usually trail off instead of punch home.) One should sip The Way We Are, not toss it down; reading the collection straight through would be like working down a Trivial Pursuit deck. Still, it charms. This is The Joy of Facts, blessed by a distinct, warm and (it must be said) visseral glow. --Salon

This isn't rocket science...

...but it is good, clean, fun urban anthropolgy. Whether she's looking at gloves or stockings or wigs or the way we eat our food, Margaret Visser's essays are always light-hearted journeys through things we'd otherwise take for granted.Other reviewers here have said this book is useless, since the information Visser collects is available elsewhere. That may be true, but what she does is bring it all together and present it in a uniformly enjoyable fashion. I, for one, don't want to pend years sifting through all the sociology, anthropology and history texts that Visser has, just to unearth the "trivial" tidbits she brings to light. So I'm just grateful that she does all the dirty work, and happy for books like hers that I can flip through in my spare time.

Very Enjoyable!

Perhaps you ought to be a Visser fan before opening thiscollection of short newspaper essays -- Much Depends on Dinner is acomplete delight. It's definitely a light read, don't take it toseriously, each essay is highly digestible and quietly thoughtful.