Rating: 
Summary: A Potent Soporific
Review: This book's tongue-in-cheek title led me to expect an entertaining and informative history of one of the world's great foods. I discovered, rather, an informative but tediously boring history of the rural peasantry of Ireland, England and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. I can only recommend the book as a potent soporific capable of curing the most pernicious case of insomnia. If your sleep habits provide sufficient rest, don't bother.
Rating: 
Summary: Scholarly... but readable?
Review: This is an excellent and insightful history of the potato and the socioeconomic history of food generally in Europe from the 1600's onward. The author had to have spent a mind-boggling number of hours and accumulated mountainous volumes of research to carry this off.
That said, it is also a somewhat academic treatment -- not in the sense of having footnotes or esoteric jargon, but in the level of detail. While not entirely reader-unfriendly, is not altogether readable either.
For reasons not entirely clear to me, the author opted to structure the chapters around England, Ireland, France and the U.S. Although informative and interesting, it lacks a narrative drive that makes one want to continue reading; it lacks a story. There was a chance to build up narrative tension throughout the book by foreshadowing the Irish potato famine, but the author let that opportunity go by the wayside.
I found the reader review criticizing the lack of focus on South America to be off-base. That's a topic for a different book. This book is clearly about the potato -- albeit a New World vegetable -- and its rise to acceptance and influences on European and European-derived cultures.
Rating:
Summary: Good Popular History
Review: This title is an eminently readable social history of the potato's influence in Western Europe and the United States. It's full of fascinating facts, e.g. innante prejudice about food sources that came out of the ground delaying acceptance of the potato in Europe.The book's greatest strength is the lengthy and sympathetic description of the Irish Great Famine of the 1840's. I am somewhat familiar with the secondary historical literature of the period and can confidently say that Zuckerman has thorough grounding in the sources and has fairly presented them. There are some problems: the book could have been better organized, it skips too lightly over the origin of the potato in South America and although it cites sources, a more traditional footnoting style would have been helpful. Mr.Zuckerman, I am now your fan and look forward to reading your next book.
Rating:
Summary: Good Popular History
Review: This title is an eminently readable social history of the potato's influence in Western Europe and the United States. It's full of fascinating facts, e.g. innante prejudice about food sources that came out of the ground delaying acceptance of the potato in Europe. The book's greatest strength is the lengthy and sympathetic description of the Irish Great Famine of the 1840's. I am somewhat familiar with the secondary historical literature of the period and can confidently say that Zuckerman has thorough grounding in the sources and has fairly presented them. There are some problems: the book could have been better organized, it skips too lightly over the origin of the potato in South America and although it cites sources, a more traditional footnoting style would have been helpful. Mr.Zuckerman, I am now your fan and look forward to reading your next book.
Rating: 
Summary: Both great and disappointing
Review: While i really liked this book and found it full of useful information and insightful analysis, i also found the book very disappointing. I was disappointed by his treatment of the pre-Colombian aspects of the potato's history. We find out little about the origins of the potato, its importance and uses in pre-Colombian South America, etc. (They are part of the Western World) We also find little about the potato itself. The book is Eurocentric and just a social history. These are both shortcomings of the book and strengths. Zuckerman, who writes quite well, provides us with a tremendous social history of the potato in a few countries: France, England, Ireland and the US. The book ranges far and weaves a complex historical story with great explanations. Just the discussion on how social attitudes towards the potato is worth the cost of the book. I would recommend this book, but be forewarned that it is a limited social history.
Rating:
Summary: The Humble Spud in History
Review: With a lively literary style, journalist Larry Zuckerman explains the history and importance of the lowly tuber, from its thirteen-thousand-year origin on the high Andean plateaus to its sixteenth-century discovery by Spaniards down to the beginning of World War I. Zuckerman chronicles just four countries in his treatise about the spud, but these countries: France, England, Ireland, and the United States are, he says, representative of the Western world. Despite the potato's vital nutrients, it soon became known as the food of the poor and remained out of favor among the gentry. Even the peasants did not appreciate the strange plant that formed odd tubers which sprouted, which they declared to be of the Devil. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the potato as a staple food for Ireland's poor had become widely known. At the same time in England, the potato had yet to become a table food. Farmers fed them to their livestock. Within a hundred years, the potato had "nosed its way into English life." In France, where the fear of nightshades was even greater than in England, the potato caught on because the wet summers did not affect this hardy plant as they did grain. Zuckerman traces the tuber's history from its beginnings through the horrific Potato Famine of Ireland to farm staple in a post-Civil War U.S. The potato represented a food whose ease of preparation lightened the burden for the average American farm wife. In chapters titled Potatoes and Population, A Passion for Thrift, Women's Work, The Good Companions, and Good Breeding (showing the evolution of the tuber from exotic and fearsome to low class, to beneath notice), Zuckerman educates and entertains, and at the same time shows us that having read the history of the lowly spud, we can never regard it in the same way. Perhaps the humble potato did rescue the Western world.
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