Customer Reviews

The Hamburger: A History (Icons of America)

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The history of the hamburger would seem to be a relatively mundane and fairly well known issue. If you thought that, as I did, you would be very mistaken. The history of the hamburger is much more complicated than simply the invention and selling of meat on a bun.

The author starts the book by debunking most of the current myths about how and who invented the hamburger. And, the author uses pretty strict criteria for what a hamburger is and is not. He puts to rest the claims of many of the people who claim to be the originator and comes up with a plausible explanation of how the burger was actually invented.

From that point, the author looks at the social implications, as well as the corporate structure that made the hamburger what it is today. How did McD's get started and how did a lowly piece of meat create one of today's largest corporations? You'll just have to read the book to find out. What happened to the company that started it all? And, no, that would not be McD.

The book, while relatively short, is well written and very readable. I enjoyed learning about the sides of the hamburger that I never knew existed.

If you like hamburgers as I do this is a good history as to its growth of popularity.

Thank you! This book is great (says my husband, it was a gift for him!) Delivery was fast. Quality of the book is great...looks new.

Revealing History into why the Hamburger has emerged as an American Icon in the last century.

If you did not believe in reincarnation before, read this book, and believe! Josh Ozersky lived thousands of years ago. He has returned to write the lore of The Burger.

In the 12 airtight tombs I excavated in the Babylonian cities of Ur, Ahhh, and UhOh, we find the still-wet blankets used to gag - some think, throttle - the enclosed young men and women, likely buried before their time. Clay tablets found nearby tell the story: in a society that prized sullen conversation, these people not only couldn't shut up, they could not stick to the subject. They had to quote Homer or throw in a reference to The Book of the Dead; talk about a party with the Hyksos or minor dignitaries from Troy. They couldn't inscribe one pictograph without making it into three tablets. Babylonians could not abide that barley-liquor party chatter from Abraham and forced him to emigrate, figuring the Judeans were already famous for their intellectualism. Josh Ozersky would have ended up in a tomb as one of the Babeling 12.

Ozersky is so bright and knows so many words and has read so many books and has so many things to say. He lacks only an internal editor, and so ends up being precious. Here's an example: "A hamburger is no mere sandwich, thrown together at home for convenient eating at the gaming table of the TV room, a random pile of starch and meat. No, it is a product of modern industrial manufacturing, each burger as artfully self-contained as a Homeric hexameter. The bun and the burger were created for each other and spoke of their symbiosis in the language of circumferential geometry" (29). OK. He really wants to talk about 'the hamburger' as a metaphor special to America: created for a poor but honest subsistence diet among hardworking immigrants, it quickly became a product of purely American mechanical ingenuity and management science, then the stuff of American fortunes, and then as an export, a symbol of the American exceptionalism that ironically wants to remake the world in the image of infinitely reproducible Big Mac's. And in this form, it becomes the stuff of art and myth once again.

The irony is not lost on him; he wants us to know that NOTHING is. I appreciate that. Couldn't you have said this in, say, 50 pages? Without the asides? It's not a cocktail party, Josh.

The bottom line is, a very interesting book, more about the idea of the burger than The Hamburger itself, written by a smart kid who never got laid in high school, and is trying to make up for it now.

By the way, I made up the stuff in the first two paragraphs. Not that I think Josh makes up things - no way! We just both enjoy creating tenuous contexts.