Review
Author: Jim Harrison
Reviewed by: SHA
Issue: June 2017
Reading A Really Big Lunch was a real treat and, while reading along, did a fair amount of underlining to highlight his highly entertaining commentary, many of the laugh-out-loud type. Jane and I had a happy Happy Hour recently while sharing Harrison's funny and poignant comments, and she wanted me to order copies for others. Such is the appeal of Jim Harrison (1937-2016). Harrison wrote some 39 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and his is books were characterized by a vivid, gritty, economic, humorous, in-your-face writing style. For many years Harrison wrote essays on food and wine and was dubbed "the poet laureate of appetite." When our colleague Rob Bunzel, a big fan of Harrison, reviewed his last book, The Ancient Minstrel, in the September 2016 issue of TRE, he noted that his death created an urge to uncork a bottle of Bandol (Harrison's favorite wine) in his memory. A Really Big Lunch is a compendium of food and wine essays by Harrison and they are a delight to read. In his Introduction to this book, Mario Batali said this: "Jim was hungry thirsty, joyously friendly, and characteristically overeager for the first course to come out of the kitchen. Jim's appetite was legendary, and nothing makes a cook quiet so happy as someone who exists entirely to eat - and when not eating, to talk about eating, to hunt and fish for things to eat, or to spend time after eating talking about what we just ate." And later that he was a person who "wrote sentences that stretched beyond the wildest poetry of my imagination, resonating with stories of the friends and associates who eat well, drink Lambrusco and vin de pays as well as Bordeaux from the fifties and sixties, work hard, play hard, and experience the natural world in full."