Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time

A great true story about a very successful man that did good for all mankind.

A wonderful story, well told and speaking of the classic notion of American entrepreneurial spirit. Albeit about a thorough English gentleman, and his success in the most unique fashion during a fascinating period of U.S. history. A pleasure to read start to finish. I can almost smell the hot coffee and lemon meringue pie.

An excellent insight into early US history.

A good book

Stephen Fried's Appetite for America introduced this reader to an American family and its business that I hadn't known existed. Having been born at the very tail end of the Fred Harvey run and never having traveled much in the Southwest, either, I'd never heard of this significant slice of Americana. It chronicles the life of Fred Harvey and his sons -- notably Ford Harvey -- who kept the family's service-industry empire running strong through the heyday of American railroads. Fred Harvey -- the man and the business -- was a pioneer of the chain concept of restaurant, hotel and book store. I guess you could consider his "Harvey Girls" a straight-laced, more formal version of Hooters girls, more concerned with top-notch service than titillation. The comparison kept flashing in my mind as Fried addressed how the Fred Harvey concern for quality service naturally limited the company's ability to scale up the size of the business. In fact, I think Fried could have done much more with this aspect of the decline of the Harvey empire as automobiles replaced trains and the roadside fast-food, quantity-over-quality mentality saturated the American culture and diet. He did an excellent job of showing how World War II -- feeding all those traveling GIs -- led to compromised standards, but when the book ended I felt I wanted to know more about the waning years of the Harvey era.I thought the book was quite interesting, for the most part, but the middle portion got bogged down in a bit too much detail. I found myself wondering why I had to know every single item a person bought on a shopping excursion, for example. And all the attention the author pays to decor and specific architectural concerns of Mary Colter was pretty much lost on me, though others may be interested. All in all, I thought the book was well written, though at times bending toward the hagiographic. I think I would have liked the book a bit more if Fried had used Fred Harvey as the narrative thread to examine U.S. history from Reconstruction through World War II or so. Appetite for America does some of that, certainly, but throughout it tends to read more like a company history.