New York Times - Tejal Rao
"John Birdsall is not a polite biographer, and I say this with admiration. In his new book, The Man Who Ate Too Much, he pokes and prods at Beard’s most tender places, his hidden traumas, his deepest insecurities. Birdsall gets to what’s often missing from the cheerful narrative of James Beard, shading in the face sketched on medals and vintage book covers — a man known chiefly as a gregarious entertainer, enormous in profile, appetite and knowledge."
Washington Independent Review of Books - Nevin Martell
"The Man Who Ate Too Much is one of the finest biographies of recent memory and one of the best culinary biographies around. Consider it required reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations of modern American cooking."
The Atlantic - Madeline Leung Coleman
"Food is a haven for Beard in even his lowest moments, and Birdsall, a lovely writer, honors that with delicate reconstructions of flavor."
The American Scholar - Anne Matthews
"A marvel of narrative nonfiction that achieves for 20th-century gay history what Tom Wolfe did for aviation in The Right Stuff, a subjective and objective reconstruction of a neglected American subculture hiding in plain sight."
Times Literary Supplement - Stephanie Sy-Quia
"Packed with sensory detail, The Man Who Ate Too Much is a magnificent tribute to a titan of American life, who taught us, through the coded – or universal – language of food, our inalienable right to the pursuit of pleasure."
Boston Globe
"The food writer who, more than anyone else, inscribed the idea of an American cuisine, Beard was larger than the sum of his cookbooks and Birdsall brings him to vivid life here."
New York Times - Julia Moskin
"For the first time, Mr. Birdsall brings both scholarly research and a queer lens to Beard’s life, braiding the strands of privilege and pain, performance and anxiety, into an entirely new story."
Wall Street Journal - Rien Fertel
"Like the life of James Beard, this biography is big and beautiful, heartbreaking and true. It is the celebration that Beard deserves."
Ligaya Mishan
"Birdsall’s sentences have rhythm, too, and compress time and place so that a meal becomes a history... like the greediest of diners, I want more."
New Republic - Aaron Timms
"Beard was both a victim and a perpetrator of multiple erasures, which Birdsall records in meticulous detail… The story of Beard’s life invites us to recognize the violence that was done in the name of American cooking and expand our understanding of authenticity to include not only what’s on the plate but everything around it: the norms, prejudices, economic wounds, environmental traumas, and other social forces that go into the production of food and culinary authority. It’s a reminder that food is part of culture, and terroir not simply a matter of the soil."
Michael W. Twitty
"It is fitting that John Birdsall should give this impossibly rich tribute to the gay father of modern American food culture, revealing that it’s not the food but the ingredients within that make the cook a legend. Savoir faire, shade, dish, yearning, hunger, and creative fire made the great James Beard and this joy of a biography possible…Foundational. Important. Indispensable and delectable queer food history at its finest."
New Yorker - Adam Gopnik
"The Man Who Ate Too Much makes a fascinating and persuasive case that [James] Beard was brought to an idea of culinary Americanness by re-experiencing the American West."
Fortune
"John Birdsall pens what could be the definitive biography of America’s best-known food personality and the national culinary landscape he shaped."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-05-29
The author of the groundbreaking article, “America, Your Food Is So Gay,” turns a sharp but sympathetic eye on the carefully closeted food writer who celebrated the glories of homegrown ingredients and down-home cooking decades before they were fashionable.
Born in Portland, Oregon, James Beard (1903-1985) told friends later in life that he’d known he was gay since he was 7. During his freshman year at Reed College, he was quietly expelled after being “caught in an act of oral indecency with a professor.” He spent a desultory decade or so trying to make it as an actor and finally hit his stride in New York, where he started a cocktail catering business with an acquaintance made through his prodigious socializing. In 1940, his first book, Hors D’Oeuvre and Canapés, With a Key to the Cocktail Party, began a lifelong tradition of not acknowledging collaborators or the sources of recipes that were sometimes lifted from others and, later in his career, reprinted from his earlier books. What sold even the most mediocre of his books was his larger-than-life personality: “playful and unabashedly queer,” Birdsall notes, but only to those in the know. For average Americans, Beard was simply someone who demystified cooking and invited them to enjoy food as he did. The author’s well-written and knowledgeable text doesn’t scant Beard’s cooking and eating—indeed, luscious descriptions of memorable meals make this an appetite-arousing read—but its major secondary theme is the nature of gay life in midcentury America, where discretion was essential and discovery meant professional ruin and very likely jail. Birdsall’s analysis of Beard’s ambivalent reaction to the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969 is one of the book’s many intelligent passages decoding a worldview built on shame and secrecy, one that made Beard frequently unhappy and lonely despite his fame and success.
A thoughtful appreciation of a central figure in the story of American food culture.
