Egg
A Dozen Ovatures
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Endlessly surprising.… Like the egg itself, this book is a perfect, miraculous package.” —Mary Roach, best-selling author of Fuzz
An unconventional history of the world’s largest cellular workhorse, from chickens to penguins, from art to crime, and more.
The egg is a paradox—both alive and not alive—and a symbol as old as culture itself. In this wide-ranging and delightful journey through its natural and cultural history, Lizzie Stark explores the egg’s deep meanings, innumerable uses, and metabolic importance through a dozen dazzling specimens.
From Mali to Finland, mythologies around the globe have invested the egg with powers of regeneration and fecundity, often ascribing the origin of the world to a cosmic egg. An oracle to Romans, fought over by Gold Rush gangs, used as the foundation of the Clown Egg Registry, and blasted into space, the egg has taken on larger proportions than, say, the ovum of an ostrich.
It has starred in global dishes from the Korean comfort food ttukbaegi gyeranjjim to the less regaled yet iconic soft-boiled egg. Stark writes a biography of French-born chef Jacques Pépin through his egg creations, and weaves in her personal experiences, like attempting to make the perfect omelet or trying her hand at pysanky—the Ukrainian art of egg decoration. She also explores her fraught relationship to the eggs in her body due to a familial link to cancer, and shares her delight in becoming a mother.
Filled with colorful characters and fascinating morsels, Egg is playful, informative, and guarantees that you’ll never take this delicate ovoid for granted again.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Eggs are weird. That’s the inescapable vibe of this delightful and fascinating cultural history. Journalist Lizzie Stark examines the egg from every possible angle: as a key symbol in various cultures’ creation myths, as a food surrounded by cultural taboos (eggs weren’t eaten in Japan until the middle of the 19th century), and as an agricultural product that for centuries was only cultivated by marginalized groups—leading to tons of consequences that are still felt today. Stark has stories for days, like the new-to-us 50-year war between the U.S. government and egg poachers on an inhospitable island near San Francisco that started during the 1840s gold rush. The book is carefully researched, but it’s also deeply personal: Stark became fascinated by eggs in part because of a family history of ovarian cancer. Egg: A Dozen Ovatures provides a charming new look at something we take for granted.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science, history, art, and food come together in this quirky examination of eggs from journalist Stark (Pandora's DNA). Stark proves to be an excellent storyteller as she charts the surprising role eggs have played throughout history and across cultures: she covers the "egg rush" on the Farallon Islands in 1848, when one could make a fortune with eggs; the horrors of industrial-scale chicken farming; the "clown egg registry" located in a basement in London, where famous clowns are immortalized by having their likenesses drawn on eggs; and how research done on eggs in space has taught scientists a great deal about human illness and physiology. Elsewhere, Stark muses on the favorite egg dishes of French chef Jacques Pépin ("While he was the chef at France's top political household, he sometimes made deep-fried eggs as a first course for dinner parties"), and though she mostly focuses on chicken eggs, she discusses those of humans, as well, including some insights into how she came to love her own eggs after having her ovaries removed at 39 in an attempt to prevent the ovarian cancer that has plagued generations of women in her family. This delightful paean to the egg is equal parts fun, philosophical, educational, and irreverent.
