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Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food
In this beautifully written, vividly rendered memoir, John Haney, Gourmet magazine’s copy chief, describes his family’s day-to-day struggles, from the twilight of Queen Victoria’s reign to the dawn of the third millennium, in London’s least affluent working-class enclaves and suburbs, including a place called the Isle of Dogs–and reflects on how his family’s affection for the past and the food they loved kept them together. In crossing the Atlantic–and with it the class barrier–John is left with deep feelings of displacement and nostalgia for his Cockney roots. As he eats in some of New York City’s most expensive restaurants, he tries (and fails) to reconcile his new appetites with the indelible tastes of his youth–and the long-ago life that has continued to, and always will, define him. Peopled with unforgettable characters who find in even the greasiest kitchens the sustenance to see them through life’s hardships, Fair Shares for All is a remarkable memoir of resolve and resilience, food and family.
- GenresMemoirNonfictionFood
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 11, 2011
Rich, funny, mouthwatering. As if you swollowed the Thesauras and washed it down with gingerale. Buy it!
I am glad to see a well-crafted memoir such as this appear on the market. 'Fare Shares for All' is a brutally honest, witty, and delicious memoir. Expertly crafted, I love how this author places two important subjects, food and war, side by side: 'Blank-faced pickled onions were drowning in vinegar. Skewered at the midriff, sqadrons of cocktail sausages were lined up like fatalities on stretchers. Bulking wedges of Cheddar sat at the back in the shadows of sandwiched ham, triangulations of pork and quashed bread that were shedding meltdown butter and a hint of sty.' Later, Haney's comic timing is impeccable: 'Mum never minced her words,' said Ray. 'Remember that really bad afternoon, Den? Daylight raid. September 1940. Windows blown out. Front door gone. Half the roof off. And what does she say? 'I'm not moving for that bastard Hitler. They'll never carry me out.' Yet Haney's unsentimental eye and ear for comedy is carefully measured, never coming off as cold. He has created a moving paean to his family haunted by war and class anxiety.
I am glad to see a well-crafted memoir such as this appear on the market. 'Fare Shares for All' is a brutally honest, witty, and delicious memoir. Expertly crafted, I love how this author places two important subjects, food and war, side by side: 'Blank-faced pickled onions were drowning in vinegar. Skewered at the midriff, sqadrons of cocktail sausages were lined up like fatalities on stretchers. Bulking wedges of Cheddar sat at the back in the shadows of sandwiched ham, triangulations of pork and quashed bread that were shedding meltdown butter and a hint of sty.' Later, Haney's comic timing is impeccable: 'Mum never minced her words,' said Ray. 'Remember that really bad afternoon, Den? Daylight raid. September 1940. Windows blown out. Front door gone. Half the roof off. And what does she say? 'I'm not moving for that bastard Hitler. They'll never carry me out.' Yet Haney's unsentimental eye and ear for comedy is carefully measured, never coming off as cold. He has created a moving paean to his family haunted by war and class anxiety.
July 4, 2010
Here's what I gathered from this book: Growing up, John Haney ate a lot of food and also probably swallowed a thesaurus and too much James Joyce. Original, visceral descriptions -- particularly of food and people -- are always welcome and Haney does a good job of that, especially with the food. Run-on sentences that frequently come to more than 50 words and make heavy use of commas and parentheses are not. There were some sections, particularly toward the middle, where I thought if he varied his sentence length and broke up his long-winded paragraphs I might have liked the book more. In fact, I think that's why I liked the beginning and the end so much. Here, he breaks up his descriptions of his family with dialogue and it's refreshing.
Haney spends a lot of time in this book worrying about class issues -- if he's too snobbish to fit in with his East End working-class relatives, or if his Cockney pedigree makes him unworthy to mix with the more educated and rich. Maybe that's why he throws these great hunks of vocabulary at you. It's an effort to impress. But the more he does it, the less impressed you are.
Haney spends a lot of time in this book worrying about class issues -- if he's too snobbish to fit in with his East End working-class relatives, or if his Cockney pedigree makes him unworthy to mix with the more educated and rich. Maybe that's why he throws these great hunks of vocabulary at you. It's an effort to impress. But the more he does it, the less impressed you are.
June 23, 2010
I only made it halfway through this book. Perhaps some of the storyline was lost on me since I’m not familiar with many of the British locations and foods.
I couldn’t get past the clumsy writing style with an overabundance of double negatives. I kept wondering, Is this really his voice or is he struggling too hard to be a “writer”? He was too annoying. I couldn't finish the book.
I couldn’t get past the clumsy writing style with an overabundance of double negatives. I kept wondering, Is this really his voice or is he struggling too hard to be a “writer”? He was too annoying. I couldn't finish the book.
November 17, 2020
Food is hardly the focus of this memoir. Family, friends and reminiscing the "feel" of his childhood played a more important role. Maybe he felt motivated to sell it as a book about food because he was working at the now defunct Gourmet Magazine but this book was a case of bait and switch.
I stuck with it because... uhhhh ...I really don't know why. There were a couple of good small parts that made me want to see if there were any others like that. For some reason he had to show off his vocabulary and use as many words as he could in a paragraph. You could skip long paragraphs and not miss a thing.
I stuck with it because... uhhhh ...I really don't know why. There were a couple of good small parts that made me want to see if there were any others like that. For some reason he had to show off his vocabulary and use as many words as he could in a paragraph. You could skip long paragraphs and not miss a thing.
December 7, 2021
I love the writing and will likely buy the book for myself or ask for it for Christmas- got the book from my local branch library here in Austin, TX and might have a late fee on it but worth it.
November 28, 2011
I had been searching at the library for British Literature and saw this book in the results of the search. It sounded interesting to me, as I'm interested in cooking and recipes and such. Although there are no recipes in this book, I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was to read.
John Haney is a food writer, and was born in Great Britain. He grew up in the East End among a family of fairly eccentric people; but then again, aren't most families eccentric behind closed doors? The memoir tells the story of his growing up with his mother, father, and younger sister; he was quite a child and was very involved with food from the get-go. The reader follows Haney through his adolescence, his marriage, his move to New York City and his developing career as a food writer, working for such magazines as Saveur and Gourmet. But what really hooks the reader is his relationship with his relatives; the emotional connection he has with his different family members - his father and mother in particular. Also, the reader gets a good idea of what it was like to grow up in the 1950s-1960s in the East End, the class system at that time, and how Haney was able to get a very good education and to develop a profitable career, thus bringing himself out of his class into a more upper-class lifestyle.
I'd recommend this book to both men and women, and I actually think that men would be able to relate to Haney's childhood and life experience easily. I really had no idea how much fun this book would be as I'd ordered it "blind" from the library. I'm very glad I did.
John Haney is a food writer, and was born in Great Britain. He grew up in the East End among a family of fairly eccentric people; but then again, aren't most families eccentric behind closed doors? The memoir tells the story of his growing up with his mother, father, and younger sister; he was quite a child and was very involved with food from the get-go. The reader follows Haney through his adolescence, his marriage, his move to New York City and his developing career as a food writer, working for such magazines as Saveur and Gourmet. But what really hooks the reader is his relationship with his relatives; the emotional connection he has with his different family members - his father and mother in particular. Also, the reader gets a good idea of what it was like to grow up in the 1950s-1960s in the East End, the class system at that time, and how Haney was able to get a very good education and to develop a profitable career, thus bringing himself out of his class into a more upper-class lifestyle.
I'd recommend this book to both men and women, and I actually think that men would be able to relate to Haney's childhood and life experience easily. I really had no idea how much fun this book would be as I'd ordered it "blind" from the library. I'm very glad I did.
November 4, 2011
It says something about a book when what you liked most of all about it was a sentence on the first page. This reads in its entirety: "At this news, I excitedly emitted, through a mouth stuffed with soldiers—toast slashed into fingers for dipping in soft-boiled eggs—a butter-blotted gasp of interest and approval." Despite the title, this was for me one of two or three references to food that I can still recall. The other was a brief bit about bacon sandwiches; the other was the description of joyously eating some really bad English food to celebrate returning from some time in America. Mostly, the book concerns growing up in a family where the father is happy being a prole and the wife yearns for a rise in class. As is usually the case, this leads to nothing good, all around, including the deep schisms within the author himself. If this were the first book on the subject it would be interesting enough, but the tale has been too much told, so much so that with the death of his Dad, the only character I became attached to, I just stopped reading. All unhappy families are the same.
February 22, 2011
John Haney's Fair Shares for All is mostly a memoir of John Haney, with food playing a secondary role, especially after Haney moves to the United States and the book shifts away from his childhood and England. the book is as much about Haney's struggle with his place in the world-working in publishing in America, classically educated, but from very much working class roots. As a guy who himself comes from very working class roots on his father's side, the book was interesting, and there are times where Haney's thoughts were very familiar. The book stumbles in the last half, when the writing becomes less engaging and the thread of food throughout becomes less of a focus.
May 28, 2008
I wish I had enjoyed this book more; it seemed like the kind of thing that would be precisely up my alley. Despite the fact that I consider myself something of an Anglophile, there were a few too many cultural references that I had trouble following, which made it a little more difficult to connect with the author, despite the fact that I found his narrative style engaging and amusing.
March 31, 2012
An exceptionally good food memoir. The author, who ultimately became copy chief of the toney food magazine "Gourmet," looks back with great affection for the bacon sandwiches and seemingly endless sausages of his youth, along with his fascination with his cockney relatives, whom his mother derperately sought to rise above.
July 9, 2008
Haney's vocabulary is to be commended, but reading the dictionary would be equally amusing. It was all over for me when he described his father's furniture as "inanimate entrails". He should have listened to his sister when she said "dispense with the peripherals and the tangents".
February 17, 2009
This author has a really different writing style that make the book kind of difficult to read and follow. The book tells of his family's struggle to become middle class and the relationship of class to the food you eat.
December 9, 2016
Usually I love English food/culture writers, so it was a surprise to not enjoy a book of this ilk. The author's RAMBLING on nothing of consequence made it hard to follow any discernible story or theme.
March 21, 2010
Where was the food? For that matter, where were the good times usually inherent in the act of reading a book? Both were nowhere to be found.
Thus, I stopped reading.
Thus, I stopped reading.
July 17, 2008
Kind of aimless, and the last third of the book felt more like a therapy session than a memoir.
October 8, 2012
This originated as a long magazine article- it was very good but the expansion didn't help. The early chapters about his childhood and family are the best part.
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October 21, 2015#teaching oddly enough, since I was supervising a dissertation about food blogs.
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June 16, 2008Another food memoir and I love it so far!
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews