Notable Sandwich: Editor's Note

An amuse bouche to get you through to next week's column

The Notable Sandwich Team has been hit by a series of maladies this week, and rather than deliver a half-hearted column, we’ve opted to marshal our resources and return twice as strong next Friday. Because, you see, Notable Sandwich #48 is one that requires all of our critical faculties: corned beef. Tal and I actually argued over who would get to write this one, because few sandwiches provide as focused a lens on history’s meandering foodways, or the particular cultural alchemy of American cuisine. So, please, come back next week for what promises to be the greatest Irish-Jewish crossover event since Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom broke bread over century ago. It’s a story of empire, colonialism, technology, industry, assimilation, prejudice….and teetering piles of meaty goodness.

Until then, please enjoy a sample platter of books Tal’s reading this week:

• The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark

  “It’s a sharply written, penetrating history of all those ‘entangling alliances’ — and the mix of grand, petty, bizarre and ordinary people that made them up and took the world to its first global war.”

• Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker

  “This recently translated memoir is nearly unique among the vast body of World War I literature: the author is not an officer, never went to university, did not bring a bourgeois innocence to the trenches. Instead, he’s a socialist barrel-maker in his mid-thirties, sweating and bleeding in the trenches, with a passionate voice that even at a century’s distance renders horror and camaraderie alike painfully vivid.”

• The Faith Healers by James Randi

  “The dearly departed, ferociously skeptical magician takes on faith-healing scams in a book-length manifesto against would-be gurus who gull the sick without remorse.”

• We Are Proud Boys by Andy Campbell

  “Just released, and I’m biased because I’ve been exchanging friendly banter with Andy for years, but the history and present of the Proud Boys is an excellent metonym for the rising paramilitarism in the republican party. Campbell, who’s been a front-line far-right reporter for years, has been party to its meteoric rise, has watched more of Gavin McInness’s show than is healthy for any living human, and came out with a book-length testament to the dirty world of street-gang politics.”

• Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

  “The ultimate comfort food author for me, Pratchett created a magnificent and expansive mirror to our own foibles in his Discworld series. Monstrous Regiment is a largely standalone story about a misfit group of soldiers who are each in their own disguise. It’s also a pro-trans manifesto in a UK literary landscape pitted with TERFs.”

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We’ll be back next week with our regularly scheduled allotment of swords, socialists, and sandwiches. For now, please enjoy this strangely mesmerizing Japanese video, documenting how exactly canned meat gets made.