Description
Book SynopsisThe definitive biography of America's best-known and least understood food personality, and the modern culinary landscape he shaped.
Trade Review"Birdsall’s sentences have rhythm, too, and compress time and place so that a meal becomes a history." -- Ligaya Mishan - The New York Times Book Review
"Birdsall is not a polite biographer, and I say this with admiration... [he] applies his deep research to give us critical readings of Beard’s culinary style, documenting its zigzagging development through travel and apprenticeship, looking into dishes that shaped him and crucial meals he cooked, finding intellectual and sensual meaning in the relics of Beard’s delights." -- Tejal Rao - The New York Times Magazine
"Birdsall has a good story to tell, and tells it well…" -- Adam Gopnik - The New Yorker
"This is the first biography of Beard in 25 years and looks at not only his professional achievements but also his personal life as a gay man in 20th century America." -- The food books of 2020 to buy - The Independent
"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." -- Stephanie Sy-Quia - Times Literary Supplement
