The perfect fiction companion to The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food
Now that Michael Pollan's New York Ti... read full description
Now that Michael Pollan's New York Ti... read full description
reviews
Jan 24, 2008
judy
rated it: 
the ending just ruined it for me. there was something contrived in the magic it tried to dust over an otherwise clean, compelling narrative. i was close to love up until the epilogue's approach.
"Sometimes Akiko felt like a thief, sneaking through the desolate corners of her own life, stealing back moments and pieces of herself." (37)
"They voted to name her Joy. When she first came to live at the large brick house at the end of the drive, she spoke no More...
"Sometimes Akiko felt like a thief, sneaking through the desolate corners of her own life, stealing back moments and pieces of herself." (37)
"They voted to name her Joy. When she first came to live at the large brick house at the end of the drive, she spoke no More...
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Dec 17, 2008
Ciara
rated it: 
this would be ruth ozeki's fantastic first novel. you should go read this right now, if you haven't already. it's one of my all-time favorites. the story is based around two protaganists: one is a mixed race american woman who works as a television producer. the japanese beef council hires her to produce a series that profiles a different american family & its beef consumption every week, highlighting the all-american robust outdoors-y health of the family, & featuring a beef-heavy recipe at the
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Apr 28, 2008
Alicia
rated it:
Wow. I had heard about this book while at Smith College because it was the summer reading choice for incoming first-years. I was either a sophomore or junior at the time, and had always meant to pick it up. (Funny that only after I finished it did I learn that she is a Smith alum too).
This novel is so many things: a work of fiction, a cinematic piece in its movement, a political piece in its content, a look at "romantic" relationships and complexities, motherhood, eati More...
This novel is so many things: a work of fiction, a cinematic piece in its movement, a political piece in its content, a look at "romantic" relationships and complexities, motherhood, eati More...
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Jan 04, 2011
Osho
rated it: 
It's a little hard to know whether this is an excellent novel with horrific content, or an excellent novel that becomes somewhat disappointing over the course of the story. I tend toward the former interpretation, but some reviewers seem to agree with the latter. Specifically, the novel veers toward pedantic nonfiction documentary toward the end; since the protagonist is making a documentary, this does not trouble me. I'm a little more concerned by the sometimes heavy-handed parallelism between
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Aug 23, 2007
Michelle
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This is a tale of contrasts - Shonagon's pillow book of delicate lists juxtaposed against documentaries made to sell meat to Japanese housewives ("beef is best") ,take charge Jane Takagi-Little and submissive Akiko Ueno, and Japanese and American culture. Told mostly in alternating segments from Jane and Akiko's point of view and occasionally other characters, Jane starts the novel as a starving would-be documentarian only to land a job with Beef-EX and vows to use her skills to tel
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Apr 18, 2007
From the Publisher
Jane Takagi-Little, by trade a documentary filmmaker, by nature a truth seeker, is "racially half," Japanese and American, and, as she tells us, "neither here nor there..." Jane is sharp-edged, desperate for a job, and determined not to fall in love again. Akiko Ueno, a young Japanese housewife, lives with her husband in a bleak high-rise apartment complex in a suburb of Tokyo. Akiko is so thin her bones hurt, and her husband, an ad agency salary More...
Jane Takagi-Little, by trade a documentary filmmaker, by nature a truth seeker, is "racially half," Japanese and American, and, as she tells us, "neither here nor there..." Jane is sharp-edged, desperate for a job, and determined not to fall in love again. Akiko Ueno, a young Japanese housewife, lives with her husband in a bleak high-rise apartment complex in a suburb of Tokyo. Akiko is so thin her bones hurt, and her husband, an ad agency salary More...
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Mar 22, 2009
Anne Marie
rated it:
It is only March and I'm already going to call this as the best book I've read this year. I love the main character. She doesn't fit in anywhere, yet manipulates everyone. Interwoven into her story is an excellent commentary on the meat industry.
Read this...then quit eating meat.
Read this...then quit eating meat.
Jan 01, 2012
Frederick
rated it:
There are two main characters. Jane Takagi-Little is a Japanese American who grew up on a farm in Minnesota. She goes to Japan to study and ends up being employed by a Japanese TV network. They send her to the US to film a weekly show called 'My American Wife'. It depicts a different woman making a dish using meat. The show is sponsored by the american beef council as a way to show Japanese housewives how to prepare beef. She ends up producing some controversial and offbeat shows that get very h
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Jan 29, 2009
Jonathan
rated it:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Feb 09, 2012
Karo
rated it:
I greatly enjoyed My Year of Meats. Though the "meat" side of the novel was impossible to miss -- it is, obviously, crucial to the plot -- I found that it had very little to do with what made the book so enjoyable. I'd seen the book around in bookstores for years, but never bought it because I thought that I had the meat industry covered, having read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Don't make the same mistake I made! My Year of Meats is so much more. Jane Takagi-Little is a documentarian
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Apr 17, 2011
Ellen
rated it:
This fun, interesting and unusual novel was almost great. It's got to be one of the most original stories ever: A Japanese-American documentarian gets a job producing a Japanese reality television series sponsored by an American beef trade group. Though the show visits a different American household each week and showcases its American, meat-filled meals, the real purpose is to entice Japanese housewives into buying and serving American meat. In the course of producing the series, the protagonis
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Feb 11, 2011
Angie
rated it:
I enjoyed this book and I really wasn't expecting that. One of the most interesting parts about this book was how it introduced the poetry of Shonagon at the beginning of each chapter. Her Pillow Book of lists and observations is poignant and surprisingly modern for its age. The book follows two women's lives; one American and one, Japanese, and the point at which they intersect around a a japanese television show called My American Wife sponsored by the beef industry to sell beef to the Japa
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Dec 01, 2010
Becky
rated it: 
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Nov 01, 2010
Leslie
rated it:
Wasn't enthusiastic about this book, lukewarm after first 30 or so pages, but it became a fabulous 2-plot page turner that I couldn't put down. It is a novel but felt "real" to me, possibly because much of it is seen through the eyes of a Japanese-American woman who is producing a documentary ("The American Wife") for Japanese TV. In the course of the book she learns many of the ugly secrets of the meat industry. Each segment features a family and the wife's cooking of some k
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May 10, 2010
Ruth
rated it:
This is a novel about a year in the life of Jane, a woman who is working for a Japanese tv show sponsored by the US meat industry to highlight a different "wholesome" american family and their favorite meat recipe in each episode. The chapters are interspersed with excerpts from The Pillow Book, which I have always kind of liked, especially the lists. Over the course of the book Jane pushes the limits more and more and ends up learning all this stuff about factory farming and hormone
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May 14, 2009
Erin
rated it:
Excellent book. Highly recommended.
First of all Ruth Ozeki's writing style is lovely-- she's very talented. Secondly, the characters she created in this novel are so interesting, vivid and thoughtful that you won't soon forget them when you've finished the book.
The book tells the story of Jane Takagi-Little, a struggling documentarian who is hired to produce a Japanese television program sponsored by an American meat exporting business. As she travels from small town to s More...
First of all Ruth Ozeki's writing style is lovely-- she's very talented. Secondly, the characters she created in this novel are so interesting, vivid and thoughtful that you won't soon forget them when you've finished the book.
The book tells the story of Jane Takagi-Little, a struggling documentarian who is hired to produce a Japanese television program sponsored by an American meat exporting business. As she travels from small town to s More...
Nov 26, 2008
Elizabeth
rated it:
When the facilitator of the book club suggested that we read, "My Year of . . . " for the month of June, I could not imagine that she meant us to read and discuss a book about someone who encountered many introductions in a twelve-month span, nor an individual apprenticing in a butcher shop for fifty-odd weeks. Neither of my imagined scenarios proved entirely accurate, but main character Jane Takagi-Little does meet many people in her travels to record variety with which Americans pre
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Dec 08, 2011
Cat
rated it:
Ruth Ozeki recognizes the collaboration of commercially-fueled media hype, deliberately adopted consumer ignorance, and the bottom-line practices of the food industry, and this diagnosis of disturbing global trends and local effects rings true. There was a lot of information in this book about hormonally treated beef that I did not know in this detail, and Ozeki is clever to package that information within a novel about two women both preoccupied with their fertility. The first is a Japanese-Ame
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Aug 05, 2010
Catherine
rated it:
I'm not sure, on an objective critical level, that this is a five-star book, but once in awhile, I just don't care. The novel has two viewpoint characters. First-person narrator Jane Takagi-Little, an unemployed documentarian in the East Village who finds herself in the compromised position of producing My American Wife!, a show designed to promote consumption of beef in the Japanese market. She's also got a complicated non-romance with a jazz musician. The other main character, whose story
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Oct 12, 2009
Dufus
rated it:
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Nov 30, 2011
Justin
rated it:
Ruth L. Ozeki deftly weaves the menacing nature of uncertainty throughout her engaging novel, My Year of Meats. At the eye of this hurricane is the specter of diethylstilbestrol. The two protagonists of the novel, Akiko Ueno and Jane Takagi-Little seem to be flip sides of a coin minted with strong yet ash sensitive female heroes. Their stories seem to be tragically out of synch, as though they could be the same woman at different stages of her life. Ozeki skillfully joins these two charac
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Nov 30, 2008
Julie
rated it:
Each chapter narrates a month in the Year of Meats, Jane Takagi-Little’s year-long experience directing My American Wife!, a Japanese documentary series filmed in America. Jane is half-Japanese, raised in small-town Minnesota, and finds herself interpreting American mores for a Japanese audience when she does not always feel sympathy towards the American subjects of her show. The show is underwritten by BEEF-EX, an agency pushing the export of American beef to Japan, and as such the centerpiec
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Jan 11, 2009
Ross
rated it:
The premise in this novel -- that the protagonist is directing episodes of a Japanese television program called My American Wife!, sponsored by the American beef industry -- is full of promise. The glorification of meat through a hokey foreign television program sets the stage for some very funny moments. But the darker side of the novel dominates. Everything that is wrong with American feedlot-produced beef is material in this novel sometimes quite graphically. And some of the plot devices are
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May 10, 2011
Will
rated it:
A thought provoking book. The author had areas of strengths and weaknesses. The concept, and subject, and plot line were all interesting, and provoking, and well crafted. Where the book fell short was with character believability. I know this is a pretty harsh thing to say about a fiction writer, but it seems she couldn't put herself in the minds of the characters she was writing. When it came to cultural differences between US and Japan, THAT was believable. At times, you could tell the a
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Jan 24, 2011
Kim
rated it:
This book really did lead me down a merry path and then knock me into a muddy and shit-filled puddle.
It starts out as a simple little story of two women, miles and continents and cultures apart, linked by a tv show.
Jane is a documentarian in America, half japanese half American, making a weekly show which highlights the all American family and how they eat meat. The show is aired in Japan as part of a marketing ploy to get Japanese housewives to buy American meat.
Akiko is a More...
It starts out as a simple little story of two women, miles and continents and cultures apart, linked by a tv show.
Jane is a documentarian in America, half japanese half American, making a weekly show which highlights the all American family and how they eat meat. The show is aired in Japan as part of a marketing ploy to get Japanese housewives to buy American meat.
Akiko is a More...
May 03, 2009
Mallory
rated it:
A Japanese American woman is hired to work the Production aspect of a reality show to air in Japan called My American Wife!, which is actually sponsored by the American Beef Lobby and is to be used to convince Japanese housewives to cook the beef-and-pork laden recipes cooked by "wholesome" Middle-American Moms on each week's installment.
Let me be honest - this book is fiction, but there's a departure about 2/3 of the way through that explores (very briefly) the evils of fa More...
Let me be honest - this book is fiction, but there's a departure about 2/3 of the way through that explores (very briefly) the evils of fa More...
Jan 25, 2011
Liz
rated it:
this was really engaging and easy to get into. Maybe it's because I'm already vego, but I found the stuff about the meat industry to be the context rather than the content of the book; more the setting of the drama than the drama itself, to the extent they can be separated. it's not just a Message Book, it's a novel, and a well-constructed, suspenseful one. the main criticism I would make is that Akiko's characterisation feels pretty flat. her main purpose seems to be the shrinking victim of
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Sep 05, 2009
Diane
rated it:
Ruth L. Ozeki has managed to entertwine an absorbing love story featuring Jane, a strong Japanese-American woman character, with a well-researched polemic against the American meat industry. The main character's occupation as a documentarian serves the author well as she seamlessly overlaps scenes of meat packing abuses with those of the character's private life and relationships. The documentarian role also allows the introduction of a variety of well-developed minor characters who move the plo
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May 28, 2009
Sheehan
rated it:
I found this book on the street, literally in a box on someone's stoop while walking around my neighborhood. I had heard about it before finding it, in fact had looked for a used copy for a long time when I was living in NYC and never connected with one; then it connected with me!
The novel is a story of one woman's "Year of Meats". A year which embodies a search for an American "authenticity", a sense of self and history for the various characters and a subtle b More...
The novel is a story of one woman's "Year of Meats". A year which embodies a search for an American "authenticity", a sense of self and history for the various characters and a subtle b More...
Sep 13, 2010
Eli
rated it:
Great characters and sharp satire of corporate boosters and the overqualified dreamers who work for them; I don't think it's terribly deep as a feminist cultural analysis, but that's OK. I mention the latter because the book was released in a bizarre edition whose appendix included a long glowing anonymous review, a breezy interview with the author, and a Cliff Notes-ish set of discussion topics -- one of the worst innovations I've seen in publishing since the die-cut thriller cover. Sorry, back
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