Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked extols our profound (and precarious) relationship to what we eat, and to the natural world. Compiled from the author's much-loved Esquire, Smart, and Men's Journal columns, the book offers charging personal panoramas in the guise of food essays.

Harrison: poet, novelist and screenplay writer perhaps best known for Legends of the Fall and Just Before Dark, writes with a passion for language equal to his passion for good food. His thick, muscular phrases tumble off the tongue: you can almost hear him sampling the language as deliberately as he does his French burgundies, and with as much genuine pleasure. The essays take readers from meals in Harrison's homes in northern Michigan and New Mexico, to delicacies in New York, Los Angeles and Paris; Harrison's palate, while refined, is refreshingly earthy. He is a lover of duck thighs, pigs' feet, calves' brains, foie gras, confit, sweetbreads, game birds and mussels, served with exquisite wines and "shovels of garlic." Perhaps not surprisingly, Harrison also ruminates on gout, weight and indigestion. Equally recommended for the literary crowd and armchair cooks (although perhaps not for vegetarians).

I suppose my city upbringing and my veg friendly diet has made me too wimpy to take all the hunting and meat the author talks about. I braved on for a few more essays, but finally have it give up. It's not so much all the talk of meat; after all, I have yet to read a book by a vegetarian food writer. Rather, his description of food and meals, instead of making me drool, annoys me. He sounds like an annoying uncle at the dinner table, bragging about ordering exotic foods to be flown in, dropping names of Hollywood bigwigs he dines with... and I just have to excuse myself from his presence.

This is now heading to Rootmartin who selected it from the Yummy vbb. I hope you won't let my comments deter you, and that you will enjoy this book more than I do.

Thanks for sending this book along! Apologies that it took me so long to register it. Ended up in a pile that just got unearthed. :)

This has been sitting on my bookshelf for far too long. Dropping it off tomorrow at the Town's Book Give and Take. I hope it travels and is well-loved.