Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Summary and Reviews of Birdseye by Mark Kurlansky

Birdseye by Mark Kurlansky

Birdseye

The Adventures of a Curious Man

by Mark Kurlansky
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • First Published:
  • May 8, 2012, 272 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Feb 2013, 272 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

The first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.

Break out the TV dinners! From the author who gave us Cod, Salt, and other informative bestsellers, the first biography of Clarence Birdseye, the eccentric genius inventor whose fast-freezing process revolutionized the food industry and American agriculture.

Chapter 1

A Nineteenth-Century Man

Clarence Frank Birdseye II was born in Brooklyn on December 9, 1886. Both the year and the place are significant. In 1886, Brooklyn was a separate city from Manhattan and, in fact, was the third-largest city in America and one of the fastest growing. Between 1880 and 1890 the population grew by more than a third to 806,343 people.

One of the forces that made this dramatic growth possible in Brooklyn and neighboring Manhattan was refrigeration. Because of this new technology a large population could live in an area that produced no food but rather brought it in and stored it. Natural ice, collected in large blocks from the frozen lakes of New England and upstate New York, was stored in sawdust-insulated icehouses built along the Hudson that shipped all year long. New York City used more than one million tons of natural ice every year for food and drink. While the pleasure of iced drinks in the summer had been a luxury of the wealthy ever since Roman ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Throughout this smart, eloquent and sometimes troubling biography, Kurlansky celebrates the restless and particularly American energy that animated Birdseye: no experience or opportunity was wasted. Birdseye lived the way he ate, digesting everything. He was a curious adventurer eager to discover the next big thing, and he always looked forward. And though Birdseye lived and worked unworried by the consequences of what he did and what he made, people today must struggle with the repercussions of his inventions...continued

Full Review (873 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Jo Perry).

Media Reviews

Janet Maslin, New York Times
The first book-length biography of Clarence Birdseye… [An] intriguing book that… coaxes readers to re-examine everyday miracles like frozen food, and to imagine where places with no indigenous produce would be without them.

Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Yes, the frozen-food guy really was named Clarence Birdseye (1886-1956), and the story of his adventures is another satisfying dish from the remarkable menu of the author of Cod, Salt and other treats.

Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Covering the science behind Birdseye's other inventions along with intimate details of his family life, Kurlansky skillfully weaves a fluid narrative of facts on products, packaging, and marketing into this rags-to-riches portrait of the man whose ingenuity brought revolutionary changes to 20th-century life.

Booklist
Kurlansky's narrative gifts shine through every chapter.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



The Locavore Food Movement

In his preface to Birdseye, Mark Kurlansky faces the issue of whether or not Clarence Birdseye made what we eat better: "Eating frozen food instead of fresh represents a decline in the quality of food. But very often people are eating frozen food when they would have been eating canned, in which case frozen is an improvement." Kurlansky shows how Birdseye, along with other creators of and manufacturers of new processed foods, transformed sometimes-inferior products into those Americans preferred to eat.

But Americans are re-evaluating their relationship with frozen foods. In 2007 the word "locavore" was the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year. Locavores, who believe in eating foods grown or harvested locally (as opposed to ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Birdseye, try these:

  • Edison jacket

    Edison

    by Edmund Morris

    Published 2020

    About this book

    More by this author

    From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris comes a revelatory new biography of Thomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.

  • Chilled jacket

    Chilled

    by Tom Jackson

    Published 2016

    About this book

    The refrigerator may seem mundane nowadays, but it is one of the wonders of twentieth-century science - lifesaver, food preserver, social liberator.

We have 12 read-alikes for Birdseye, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Mark Kurlansky
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now