Awards

• Commended for Listen Up (Fiction) 2003

Overview

A modern-day take on Upton Sinclair's The Jungle With reality, humor, and a message about corporate greed, veteran filmmaker Ruth Ozeki weaves together the story of two women a world apart. Jane, a struggling filmmaker in New York, is given her big break, a chance to travel through the United States to produce a Japanese television program sponsored by an American meat-exporting business. But along the way, she discovers some unsavory truths about love, honor, and a particularly damaging hormone called DES that wreaks havoc with her uterus. Meanwhile, Akiko, a painfully thin Japanese woman struggling with bulimia, is being pressured by her child-craving husband to put some meat on her bones, literally. How Jane's and Akiko's lives intersect in wacky cross-cultural collisions provides romance, humor, intrigue, and even a muckraking message about questionable meat and the homogenization of America. This is the perfect fiction companion to The Omnivore's Dilemmaand In Defense of Food.

Full Product Details

9780786191987

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Reviews

"""A comical-satirical-farcical-epical-tragical-romantical novel...delicious...up-to-the minute."" -- ""Chicago Tribune"" ""A stunning combination of outstanding writing and performance...Fields is a wonder as she flows from Japanese to various American accents and Japanese-inflected American. Her tour de force delivery of this feminist satire provides a refreshing dose of comedy to serious issues...Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award."" -- ""AudioFile"" ""Ozeki skillfully tackles hard-pressing issues such as the use and effects of hormones in the beef industry and topics such as cultural differences, gender roles, and sexual exploitation. Her work is unique in presentation yet moving and entertaining."" -- ""Library Journal"" ""Romance, agribusiness, self-discovery, cross-cultural misunderstanding--it takes talent like Ruth Ozeki's to blend all these ingredient beautifully together...[in a] sensitive and compelling portrait."" -- ""Arthur Golden, New York Times bestselling author"" ""Successfully transmits what it truly feels like to be 'other'...This was a laugh-cry book through and through."" -- ""Entertainment Weekly"" ""The characters, major, minor and incidental, are all well written and beautifully portrayed by actress Anna Fields...She never loses a single character, and when people reappear after a long hiatus in the story, they are immediately recognizable in the voice of this actress. She gets the laughs in the text, as well as the heartache."" -- ""Audiobookstoday.com "" ""There is an ardent passion to the center of this novel...rare and provocative."" -- ""USA Today"""

Author Information

"Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker and novelist who has won major awards in both fields. Her first novel, My Year of Meats, won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes & Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versailles. All Over Creation was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the American Book Award, as well as the 2004 WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her award-winning novels have been described as ""witty, intelligent, and passionate"" by the Independent, and as possessing ""shrewd and playful humor, luscious sexiness, and kinetic pizzazz"" by the Chicago Tribune. She began her media career as an art director in film, switched to directing television documentaries, and then began making her own films, of which Body of Correspondence won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. A frequent speaker on college and university campuses, she serves on the advisory editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review. Anna Fields (1965-2006), winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award in 2004, was one of the most respected narrators in the industry. Trained at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, she was also a director, producer, and technician at her own studio, Cedar House Audio."

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