The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture. By John Davis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. pp. 264 + 107 illus.

The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture. By John Davis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. pp. 264 + 107 illus.


Americans have maintained an ongoing relationship with the Holy Land. From pilgrimages to Palestine, to models and artwork that recreated holy sites on American soil, to repeated descriptions of the United States as a new Zion, Americans have expressed a profound cultural attachment to the Biblical homeland. The Holy Land is one of the most richly imagined places in American culture and its representation has always been a central component in the construction of American identity. In The Landscape of Belief, John Davis offers a unique perspective on artistic portrayals of the Holy Land in nineteenth-century America. In his richly narrated and illustrated volume, Davis explores the ways that Americans formulated their own national identities through depictions of the Holy Land.

Davis divides the book into two parts. The first four chapters explore the range of Holy Land images that became popular in the nineteenth century. Davis carefully outlines the diverse sources of interest in Palestine as well as the cultural and technological innovations that spurred Holy Land representation. He begins by presenting an overview of the ways that the Holy Land served as a metaphor for Americans as they shaped their own culture. References to the Land of Israel abounded in the religious rhetoric of the early nation and in the political debates over slavery and the Civil War. After summarizing the prevalent usages of the Holy Land in American discourse, Davis focuses on the growth of the travel industry after the Civil War, examining the travel literature, religious pilgrimages, and archaeological findings that grounded American relationships to the Holy Land. As an increasing number of American artists, scholars, and writers traveled to Palestine, they began producing visual and literary works that built a vernacular culture surrounding the Holy Land.

In one of the most engaging portions of the book, Davis describes the many visual media that shaped the images of the Holy Land in American public culture. At “Palestine Park,” the landscape recreation of the Holy Land created by New York’s Chautauqua Society, visitors were able to experience the sacred geography of Israel by walking through large-scale [End Page 343] models and participating in Bible lectures and reading circles. In the years before the popularization of photography, many Americans owned stereoscopes and purchased sets of stereographs that enabled them to view the landscape and sites of Palestine and to travel vicariously to the Holy Land. Through these and other examples, Davis argues convincingly that “a certain ‘Holy Land’ consciousness permeated most levels of nineteenth-century American society” (p. 51).

Davis is particularly interested in the panoramic paintings and photographs that formed the basis of American conceptions of the Holy Land. Landscape paintings were the dominant motif of representing the Holy Land before the Civil War, but the medium of photography quickly eclipsed the canvass as the most popular form of portraying Palestine and its people. The strength of Davis’s discussion lies in his ability to connect the many different visual representations of the Holy Land, revealing the pervasiveness of these images in American culture. In his narrative, Davis contextualizes artistic productions within the framework of American social, political, and religious interests in the Holy Land, demonstrating the cultural matrix of American preoccupation with Palestine and the efforts to render it accessible to the American public.

In the second half of The Landscape of Belief, Davis focuses on four individual painters: Miner Kellogg, Edward Troye, James Fairman, and Frederic Church. Each of these artists devoted at least part of his career to painting Palestine. Readers will be most familiar with Frederic Church, by far the most well-known of the four painters. For Davis, the issue is not the popularity of the artists, but their particular relevance as case studies for understanding the relationship between their works and the popular interest in the Holy Land described in the first part of the book. Davis presents a compelling and intricate analysis of the artists and their paintings, but his argument might have been strengthened...

The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy Paperback – April 15, 2000 by Odile Redon (Author), Françoise Sabban (Author), Silvano Serventi (Author), Edward Schneider (Translator), University of Chicago Press

The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy Paperback – April 15, 2000

by Odile Redon  (Author), Françoise Sabban (Author), Silvano Serventi (Author), Edward Schneider (Translator), University of Chicago Press

The Medieval Kitchen', written originally in French by Odile Redon, Francoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi, is the best of the three books I have reviewed so far on the cuisines of Europe before the arrival of New World produce. This volume surpasses both `The Medieval Cookbook' by Maggie Black and `Pleyn Delit' by Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler in technical scholarship and in it's interest to the non-professional foodie, historian, or general reader.

The book is organized by chapters which are very similar to a contemporary cookbook, covering Soups and Pastas; Porees and Vegetables; Meats cooked in Sauces; Roasted Meats; Fish; Pies and Tarts; Sauces; Eggs; Fritters and Breads; and Sweetmeats. The selection of recipes is much more interesting than in `The Medieval Cookbook' and the `arrangement' is as good or better than `Pleyn Delit', with much more background given for each individual recipe than either of the other two books. See my review of `Pleyn Delit' for a complete list of interesting things to do with these books.

The most impressive contribution of `The Medieval Kitchen' is its generalizations about medieval cooking in 50 pages of introductory essays on aspects of these 600-year old French and Italian cuisines. The highlight of this overview is the observation that 14th and 15th century European cooking was in love with spices in general and the `cookie spices', cinnamon and cloves, in particular. One may think that this is due to the influence of contact with the Moslem world, especially as the use of these spices is still strong in Sicily and Spain, but the authors state that this influence is overstated. Interest in spices was home bred. My other reviewed works show the very common use of saffron in recipes, but does not explain the broad use of a very expensive ingredient. `The Medieval Kitchen' clearly explains that while little attention was paid to odors directly, the color of food was given an important place in the preparation of medieval recipes. One can almost predict the great interest Europeans would have in the bright red of tomatoes and chiles from the New World.

Unlike today, where so many provisions are prepared and prepackaged by national or international companies, it is surprising to see that the medieval city had lots of shops run by foodstuff specialists, the only trace in today's France may be the boulanger for bread, patisserie for pastries, and the chocolatier for chocolate candies. The spice merchant, in particular, was a very important food specialist. A pale shadow in Europe of this merchant's work is the quatre epices and herbes de Provence. In the last 10 years, there seems to be a great growth in prepared seasoning mixes. I wonder if Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse and McCormick's and Durkee are simply reviving a 600-year-old practice by bottling and marketing spice mixes.

While the authors do not elaborate on this point, as it deals with a period after their chosen subject, they state that the emphasis on spices was replaced (except for pepper) by an emphasis on the use of local herbs such as lavender, mint, thyme and marjoram and by use of a broader range of cooking fats and oils in the seventeenth century.

As the Medieval period is quite rightly pictured as a period when progress in science some fine arts may have slipped from highs achieved in the ancient Roman and Greek worlds, this does not mean medieval domestic arts and crafts were not unsophisticated. In fact, one may be impressed by exactly how sophisticated their cooking techniques were, especially in the absence of convection ovens and electric ranges. Their emphasis on constantly processing and straining to achieve an especially smooth preparation reminds me of a description of Thomas Keller's kitchen at the French Laundry. On top of routinely elaborate techniques performed by a great range of specialists rivaling Escoffier's famous brigade system, there are also the very special preparations headlined by the entirely historical feat of baking `four and 20 blackbirds' into a pie. Not only was this actually done, the book tells us that it was common for banquets of the nobility, and it tells us how it was done.

As readable and as informative this book is for the casual foodie, it is a very serious work of scholarship which gets everything right, even those things which my two previous subjects did poorly. The method for citing sources is much better and, even though the book as a whole is translated from the French, all the original recipes in their original Latin, Medieval French or Italian, or Old English are supplied, along with modern English translations of these texts, followed by modern culinary interpretations of the recipes. Even on so small a matter as the selection of color prints, this volume picks much more interesting plates than `The Medieval Cookbook'.

The translator, the authors, or the publisher (University of Chicago Press) also did an excellent job of making the work available to an American audience. All measurements are in both metric and English units and many solids amounts are given by both weight and volume. Culinary unit conversions are typically very gross, as, for example, it is much easier to measure 1 liter for 4 cups rather than 946 milliliters, which is a much more accurate conversion. Even the sources are up to date American companies such as Dean & Delucca, Penzey's Spices, D'Artagnan, and King Arthur Flour.

While this book is superior in every way to the other two works cited, they are not superseded by this work, as they concentrate on English dishes while `The Medieval Kitchen' concentrates on France and Italy. In fact, it is useful to compare recipes in the three books to see how much they had in common.

Highly recommended as a source for a medieval theme entertainment, historical interest, and an understanding of realities of medieval life.

Skies of Parchment Seas of Ink Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts edited by Marc Michael Epstein , Princeton University Press

The British Library
An image from volume 2 of The Tripartite Mahzor showing the revelation at Sinai; male protagonists have human heads, but women are given the heads of various animals, Germany, Lake Constance region, circa 1320


Since the late eighteenth century, Jews have often been viewed as contributing little to the visual arts. The idea began with Enlightenment thinkers, such as Kant, whose disdain for sensory experience led him to praise what he considered to be the admirably abstract, image-less, and therefore philosophical nature of ancient Hebrew religious thought. Since then, Jews’ alleged disregard for aesthetics has been variously attributed to the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven images, or to a logocentric culture’s lack of interest in the visual realm. Jews have even been said to have a defective sense of color.


Although the iconophobia of pre-modern Jewry has now been thoroughly debunked by scholars—Kalman Bland’s Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (2000) details a rich history of Jewish aesthetic theory and artistic production—it is all too often replaced by a stereotyped idea of Jewish art, all caftans and camels or dancing violinists, and in any case distinctly archaic and thoroughly kitsch. Like the idea of the single-mindedly bookish Jewish scholar, this stereotype emphasizes the Jews’ cultural difference, in that it imagines Jews as quaint, rural, and/or exotic, separate in habit, dress, and mindset from the peoples among whom they live.


The gorgeously illustrated volume Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts, edited by Marc Epstein, should challenge almost all assumptions about Jewish identity, difference, or art. Its twelve instructive chapters and 287 full-color images survey a stunning array of illustrated books made for Jews from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries. There are legal works slathered in gold leaf, and haggadoth (Passover seder texts) and prayer books whose margins bloom with botanically accurate flora and fauna. Although such manuscripts served Jews’ religious needs, Epstein repeatedly emphasizes their similarity (in style, composition, quality, and cost) to books made for contemporary Christians and Muslims.

The British Library
An image from The Duke of Sussex Ashkenazic Pentateuch, in which the leaders of the tribes are shown as knights ranged around the Tabernacle, represented by the decorated opening of the book of Numbers, “And [God] spoke,” Germany, Lake Constance region, early fourteenth century


Skies of Parchment also contains a number of secular manuscripts that have nothing to do with the practice of Judaism. Only the Hebrew lettering tells us that the dashing, turban-wearing protagonist of the verse epic The Book of Conquest is a Jewish rather than Persian hero. And a medical text in Latin betrays its “Jewishness” only in the fact that its anatomical chart shows a man with a circumcised penis. The majority of the illustrations are executed in the most up-to-date styles, often by the same artists and workshops patronized by Christian and Muslim book-loving nobles and burghers, suggesting that Jews and their neighbors had similar social values and ideas of beauty.


In most cases, the figures depicted in these books share the clothing, habits, and surroundings of the majority culture. In a thirteenth-century French miscellany, King Solomon is arrayed like a Capetian king. A teacher chastising his pupil could be any university-educated Christian pedagogue, and an illustration from a Spanish Haggadah depicts Moses and his family returning from Midian in a way almost identical to (indeed, they are directly modeled on) Mary, Joseph, and Jesus fleeing to Egypt. The hybrid beasts and grotesqueries that festoon these pages are as bizarre, silly, and scatological as any of the wildest flights of medieval Christian illuminators’ fancy. And although Jews did differ from Christians in generally avoiding depictions of the deity, even God makes an occasional appearance, his haloed bust emerging from a cloud to instruct the Psalmist, as he would in any Christian manuscript. 



The British Library
left, An image from The Golden Haggadah showing Moses and his family returning to Egypt from Midian, Spain, Barcelona, circa 1320; right, an image from the Breviari d’Amour by Matfré Ermengau of Béziers showing Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus fleeing Bethlehem for Egypt, Eastern Spain, last quarter of the fourteenth century


There is one striking exception to the overall non-distinctiveness of Jewish art and self-representation: the small group of German manuscripts made in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that depict human figures with the heads of griffins, birds, or animals. This approach is convincingly analyzed as not just an exceptional attempt to observe the Second Commandment by avoiding human representation, but as a creative way to deploy aspects of nature as positive symbols of Jewish identity. In light of the thousands of human figures we encounter throughout this beautiful volume, one wonders whether it wasn’t also a way for select patrons to distance themselves not only from Christians but also from their less rigorous co-religionists—an indication of the considerable diversity, even tension, within medieval Jewry.


Judaism may have been a minority, rejected, or even despised faith for much of its history, but this survey of the Jewish illustrated book shows that medieval Jewish elites conceded nothing to their Christian and Muslim counterparts when it came to fashion, taste, and extravagance. In their pursuit of beauty and luxury they employed the same artists, shared the same aesthetics, wore the same fashions, and even used the same compositions and (with modifications) symbols as Christian and Muslim elites. Some scholars and observant Jews find such similarities difficult to square with Jewish piety, and the sometimes uncomfortable reality of Jews’ insecure legal status. In her book Antisemitic Hate Signs in Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval Germany, the late Ruth Mellinkoff even hypothesized that Christian artists snuck sly anti-Jewish messages into the manuscripts they made for unsuspecting Jewish patrons. Epstein and his colleagues, more convincingly, see this cultural boundary blurring—variously called syncretism, acculturation, hybridity, mimicry—as a form of creativity and a sign of confidence, even defiance. But the very existence of such a debate may point to an intrinsic aspect of Jewish history. It seems possible that, in fact, the only real “essence” of Jewishness is a constant, complex, and ultimately unresolvable dialectic between accommodation and resistance. 

The British Library
Opening page of Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Portugal, Lisbon, 1490 

The British Library
A page from the Fath Nama, by ʿImrani, showing Joshua–in traditional Persian clothing–crossing the Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant, Persia, late seventeenth century 

The British Library
An image from the Miscellany of biblical and other texts showing the Judgment of Solomon, who appears here arrayed like a Capetian king, France, Amiens, 1277–1286 

The British Library
An image from the Coburg Pentateuch showing a teacher, who appears in the clothing of a traditional Christian pedagogue, chastising a pupil, Coburg, 1390–1396

The British Library
An image from volume 2 of The Tripartite Maḥzor showing Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boʿaz; male figures have human heads, but women are once again given the heads of various animals, Germany, Lake Constance region, circa 1320

Hubert Robert by Margaret Morgan Grasselli edited by Margaret Morgan Grasselli & Yuriko Jackall Hardcover, Lund Humphries, 281pp £45

Hubert Robert by Margaret Morgan Grasselli edited  by Margaret Morgan Grasselli & Yuriko Jackall Hardcover, Lund Humphries, 281pp £45

In Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art there is a circular ceramic plate, twenty-three centimetres in diameter and painted black. Look into the pool of black and – like a reflection in an eye – you notice a window. And leading to the window is a corridor in which figures wrapped in coats shuffle along slowly. This is Saint-Lazare, a hospital converted into a prison during the Reign of Terror. The artist is Hubert Robert, who lived from 1733 to 1808. He painted on whatever wood, ceramic or canvas he could find. In another work he depicts the milkmaids who – for a fee – pass jugs over the balustrade of a staircase into the outstretched arms of the prisoners. Fewer than twenty plates were painted during Robert’s nine months in prison in 1793–4 under suspicion; some of these depict life in jail, but more of them are of Arcadian landscapes of shepherds and waterfalls.

Ten years earlier Robert had masterminded the design of the dairy and landscape at Rambouillet, a gift from Louis XVI to Marie Antoinette. The king would go there to hunt and she would make cheese. The Laiterie de la Reine was a temple to milk. It had a neoclassical interior domed with white light, and pure water splashed from a grotto. A set of Sèvres porcelain designed for it included four cups moulded from a breast and balanced upon goats (an allusion to Rousseau’s advocacy of breast-feeding children).

In the 1780s Robert was garden designer and curator to the king, who charged him with transforming the royal palace of the Louvre into a museum. He was also one of the most fashionable artists in Europe, dubbed ‘Robert des ruines’ by Denis Diderot in an ecstatic review of the Salon of 1767. Robert expressed, on an epic scale and more than any other artist, the ruins mania of late 18th-century Europe, which arose from a combination of archaeological discovery, the new artistic taste for the asymmetrical and fragmentary, and the doubts of rising empires about their own fates. In a classic Robert scene you will see a great Roman structure and, probably through an arch, an antiquity being dug out of the ground. He is exceptional in combining the vigour of archaeological research with the lassitude of decay and takes a student’s delight in marrying the awesome with the reflection that Paris and London will one day join Rome in ruination.

‘Of all the artists I have known, Robert was the one who cut the best figure in society’, remembered Vigée Le Brun, whom Robert escorted to the gates of Paris at her flight from the city in 1789. ‘I doubt that he dined at home more than three times a year … He was naturally intelligent, was very learned without a trace of pedantry’ – he translated Virgil – ‘and the inexhaustible gaiety of his personality made him the most beloved man that one could find in society.’ He was chubby but played a nimble game of football, and a party piece was to impersonate an acrobat on a tightrope.

Robert was born at court, the son of a valet and a chambermaid to a marquis. A prodigy, he was taken to Rome in the retinue of the duc de Choiseul, France’s ambassador to the pope. Soon after his return eleven years later he was accepted into the Académie on his debut; that was exceptional, and the title of ‘painter of architecture’ that he received was unique.

He introduced himself with an oil painting in which the Roman Pantheon is picked up and put down on a newly built baroque flight of steps leading to a port on the Tiber, where it is joined by Michelangelo’s Palazzo dei Conservatori, levitated from the Campidoglio. Robert learned this genre of capricci from the painter Panini and the engraver Piranesi. What he added was a fleshiness of paint: stones glisten with moss and well-water.

‘By what magic?’ exclaimed Diderot in a review that is often quoted in the context of the ‘ruins sublime’ of the late 18th century. Less often quoted is his reaction (published art criticism was beginning at this time) to the ‘life’ he saw in the quicker, sketchier paintings of a new generation, less polished than the old school. But within four years he was cross. Robert was too ‘facile’. He painted a picture each day in order to pay for his wife’s dresses. The French and American contributors to this catalogue suggest that the fa presto (‘make quickly’) style of Robert and his sketching partner Fragonard was in itself a statement on the social position of the artist: Robert, never subservient, exhibited the nonchalance that was one invention of the age.

But the mystery is the man. We know that four children died young; that he was, perhaps, one of the best-loved artists there has ever been; and that he painted the same scenes – very often including the figure of an artist at an easel – for the king, the new rulers ushered in by the Revolution, and Napoleon.

It is this equable detachment that makes his pictures so valuable. If Goya had painted that prison corridor, we might not believe in the boy or the dog. But we learn here that the boy petting the dog beside the brazier was Emile Roucher, the five-year-old son of a poet who had requested his presence in captivity; that prisoners could bring in dogs; and that they would wave and signal to relatives and friends in the rue Paradis out of the window.

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of a hundred of Robert’s works at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the first comprehensive show in the United States. The most recent to take place in France was in 1933. What makes the book so enjoyable are not just the production standards (the images are superb) or the five short essays on aspects of Robert’s work but also the 102 individual catalogue entries. These provide the gritty small print to each of the pictures: its size and medium, its content and markings, and the names of those through whose hands it has passed. British art historians and institutions such as Tate and the Royal Academy have long since abandoned this patient detective work in favour of contextual essays. Take Robert’s painting of the demolition of the Bastille in 1789. A Tate curator would slop out a few hundred words on the fashionable themes of the sublime; or imagine, if you can, the constipated baroque grimace of Simon Schama on what the dark skies prefigure. But reading a good catalogue entry is like squinting through a keyhole onto history. An inscription tells us it was gifted to the marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American War of Independence and a member of the committee that approved the dismantling of the old prison. And we learn that, curiously, only five out of four hundred works at that year’s Salon addressed political events. ‘This relative indifference to the events unfolding persisted at subsequent Salons’, we are told. ‘Of the 794 numbers listed in 1791, only 35 (including about ten portraits of deputies) made any kind of reference to the ongoing political situation; in 1793 about 50 did so out of the 1,035 numbers listed in the catalog and its supplement.’ That is thought-provoking. Elsewhere we learn that Robert’s painted plates were sold by the jailer for a louis apiece. The unexpected destinies of objects from history interrupt – like a gouge in a record – the smooth trundling of art-historical theory.

It is said that Robert’s plates were popular with the English who remained in Paris during the Revolution. But why are there so few works by Robert in British collections, public or private, as I discovered when assembling an exhibition on artists and ruins many years ago? Is Robert too baroque, at heart, for a nation that is still frightened of curves, and sceptical of the value of domes and porticoes? That was a reason to go to Paris. In the back room of the gallery of Jean de Cayeux, who devoted his life to the study of Robert, his daughter opened a box of sanguines of Rome – that is, sketches in soft, blood-red chalk. This was a perfect medium for capturing masonry so fragile and jungled that as the young artist sketched with a board on his knees, ancient stones and plasterwork would be dislodged by the sudden flutter of a bird taking off from the wet ivy. These are some of the most beautiful studies of ruins ever committed to paper. Robert – loveable, chuckling, gifted Robert – is lucky to be the subject of such an exceptional publication.

HOT DOGS, THE JEWISH AMERICAN FAST FOOD: Nathan's Famous: The First 100 Years of America's Favorite Frankfurter Company Paperback

HOT DOGS, THE JEWISH AMERICAN FAST FOOD:  Nathan's Famous: The First 100 Years of America's Favorite Frankfurter Company Paperback

Famous Nathan: A Family Saga of Coney Island, the American Dream, and the Search for the Perfect Hot Dog Hardcover – June 21, 2016 by Lloyd Handwerker & Gil Reavill , Flatiron Books 

Nathan's Famous: The First 100 Years of America's Favorite Frankfurter Company Paperback – May 10, 2016 by William Handwerker , Jayne A. Pearl ,Morgan James Publishing

The rollercoaster history of the wiener in a bun, in new books on the Coney Island institution, Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs.

Many think that fast food was invented by Ray Kroc when he opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. But it is probably Nathan Handwerker who deserves the distinction, argues his grandson Lloyd Handwerker in his new book Famous Nathan (in 2014 Handwerker made a documentary film with the same name). Nathan founded his hot dog stand, Nathan’s Famous, in 1916 at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island. It was called a “grab joint”—the term “fast food” wouldn’t arrive until the 1950s. “Give ’em and let ’em eat!” Nathan called to his troops as they made “the sweep”: There were no lines at the Nathan’s counter, just a hungry horde served by countermen who served up dogs at the speed of light. By 1916 the hot dog was already a craze in America: Babe Ruth boasted of eating two dozen at a time with a gallon of lemonade.

The inventor of this American gastronomic ritual, Nathan Handwerker, was born in 1892 in Narol, a shtetl in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. The Handwerkers were desperately poor, with 13 children, and Nathan’s father, a shoemaker down on his luck, had to go begging from town to town to make ends meet. At age 11, Nathan got a job in a nearby town at a bakery, where he slept near the oven and had to wake at midnight to prepare the dough.

By 19, Nathan was on a boat headed for America. Six months after his arrival he was working at Max’s Busy Bee, a luncheonette counter in Manhattan. A few months later, Nathan took one of his cousins to a day at the beach. They took the trolley down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island, strolled around the glittering attractions of the world’s most famous amusement park, and bought Cracker Jacks, sometimes called “the first junk food.”

Coney Island stuck in Nathan’s head. He wanted some extra hours on the weekends, when business at Max’s was slow. What better place than Coney Island? He went to Feltman’s restaurant on Surf Avenue, just across from Luna Park, “the Heart of Coney Island,” and got a job as a roll-cutter. Charles Feltman, an immigrant from Germany, was probably the one who, some time in the late 1860s, first served up that brilliant snack: a frankfurter on a warm bun. Feltman’s creation wasn’t called a “hot dog” but a “dachshund sandwich” or a “Coney Island red hot.” Unlike today’s skinless franks, they had sheep’s gut casings tied at both ends like a bratwurst, making a satisfying snap when a hungry customer took the first bite. On a good summer day Feltman’s might serve 40,000 dachshund sandwiches.

Before long, Handwerker had quit his job in the city and opened up his own store in Coney Island. Shrewdly, he lowered the price of his dog to just 5 cents, compared to Feltman’s 10. Most important of all, Nathan ran a grab and go counter, not a sit-down restaurant like Feltman’s. Nathan had intuited the future of American dining: eating on the run, for cheap.

Not long before Nathan’s era Coney Island was an uproarious, criminal place that easily rivaled any old-world den of sin. In its early years, from the 1880s until WWI, Coney was known for gambling, brothels, and all-night bars where many an unwary customer found himself stripped of his cash.  “It is blatant, it is cheap, it is the apotheosis of ridiculous, but it is something more,” the author Reginald Wright Kauffman wrote about Coney Island in 1909. That same year 20 million visitors hit Coney, among them Sigmund Freud. Kaufmann compared Coney Island to the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls: an American landmark. Coney Island had Steeplechase Park, Dreamland (which burned down in 1911), and Luna Park. Steeplechase featured the Human Roulette Wheel and the Barrel of Love, where customers as they entered the park were pitched against each other by the barrel’s moving floor. Dreamland had Lilliputia, a tiny town inhabited by 300 midgets, and a circus with 27 lions at the beck and call of Captain Bonavita, who had “soulful eyes and a tremendous handlebar moustache,” according to Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson’s book Sodom by the Sea: An Affectionate History of Coney Island. Luna Park was an  “Electric Eden” with a quarter of a million light bulbs, “a kind of architectural ‘Little Egypt,’ deliciously sensuous,” wrote John Kasson in his book on Coney Island, Amusing the Million. There were wax museums, Ferris wheels, and roller coasters calculated to “make your girl throw her arms around your neck and yell.”

The designers of Coney Island’s amusement parks had the genius idea of making the crowds themselves the spectacle: excited strangers enjoying promiscuous contact, escaping from the workaday world into a carnivalesque realm where most of the fun cost just a nickel or a dime, from skeet shooting and freak shows to Coney’s most popular attraction, Steeplechase’s Insanitarium. Here a clown dressed as a farmer teased the ladies in the crowd with an electric prod that he gingerly applied to their buttocks. Then the shrieking women passed over a blowhole that lifted up their skirts. Some male customers were known to spend hours in the Insanitarium, sending out from time to time for food. On the stage stood a tree with hot dog branches, some of them adorned with ladies’ bloomers.

The one respectable attraction at Coney was the premature baby incubators run by Dr. Martin Couney, who saved thousands of babies with advanced medical techniques in his immaculate “hatchery.” At least one woman returned each week for years to watch the development of the babies. It cost 25 cents to see the incubators, though Dr. Couney eventually had to cut his prices. In 1940 he groused, “Coney Island is so degraded now—even the hot dogs cost only a nickel—that people bargain to see my babies.”

***

In 1919, Nathan enjoyed an extraordinary stroke of luck: A new El stop, West End Depot, opened at Stillwell and Surf Avenues, a hundred feet from Nathan’s store. After a long train ride almost everyone wanted one of Nathan’s nickel dogs before hitting the beach or the attractions of Steeplechase or Luna Park. On the way back the sunburned visitor would have another hot dog with a pineapple juice or lemonade (also a Nathan’s specialty). As time went on Nathan expanded his operation to include burgers, seafood, knishes, even roast-beef sandwiches. French fries were almost as central to Nathan’s as hot dogs. Fanatical about quality, he made trips to Maine to look for the best potatoes and would buy an entire farm’s crop if he was impressed by it.

Public suspicions about hot dogs were rife even in 1916, when Nathan’s first opened. They stemmed largely from Upton Sinclair’s stomach-churning novel The Jungle of 1906, which detailed the unsanitary practices of slaughterhouses. The hot dog first got its name from a cartoonist named Tad Dorgan, who about the time that Sinclair’s book came out drew a bevy of talking sausages labeled “hot dogs,” playing on the popular rumor that frankfurters were made of canine flesh and other unpalatable substances. Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, Nathan put up a “No horsemeat!” sign on his store. (This was a possibility: At least one factory in Greenpoint supplied Coney with horseflesh wieners.) There was another innovation: Nathan, whose establishment lacked rabbinic supervision, proclaimed that his all-beef franks were “kosher-style,” an ingenious term calculated to reassure his Jewish clientele.

Nathan cared obsessively about quality of food and service. In the beginning he slept in the store, often on potato sacks, and woke up when a customer rang the bell for service, sometimes at three or four in the morning. Nathan and his wife Ida, who worked alongside him, spent virtually all their waking hours in the store. As time went on, he became a shrewd publicity campaigner: For special celebrations when gave out free hot dogs, Nathan made sure they were larger than usual so that new customers, stunned by the size of their dogs as well as their tastiness, would come back soon.

Nathan paid his employees well, quietly gave out free hot dogs to those who couldn’t pay, and hired and promoted minority workers. But he could be a hard man to like, the reader learns from Handwerker’s book. He was a micromanager suspicious of any employee who had a clean apron—not a hard enough worker, Nathan thought. He obsessively checked the garbage cans for food that shouldn’t have been thrown away. And like all restaurant owners, he watched like a hawk for employee theft. One reason that restaurateurs prefer to hire relatives, Handwerker notes in Famous Nathan, is that they think that blood relations will steal less from them than strangers. Still, Nathan’s grandson Steve remarks that Nathan “didn’t like a lot of people in the family. … He saw them as lazy, as non-industrious, or trying to get away with something.” Nathan’s most prized employees were workhorses like himself who during the summer season toiled seven days a week, 10 hours a day. The work ethic had its tragic side: Sidney Handwerker’s sister Rosie got pregnant at the wrong time, during high season, tried to give herself an abortion, and botched the job. She died at Coney Island Hospital.

During WWII Nathan’s was the one spot of light on Coney Island—literally. The rest was subject to a blackout, since German U Boats prowled the Atlantic coast. But Nathan convinced the government that he could shut down his business in 60 seconds in case of an attack, so he was allowed to stay open 24 hours, with the amusement parks and bars shrouded in darkness.

Probably the most tedious job at Nathan’s was counting coins, not just because they were frequently filthy—coated in sand, suntan oil, and grease—but because in prewar days they had to be counted and rolled by hand into paper tubes to take to the bank. This operation happened at the end of the summer, and Nathan’s sons were the chief workers, hour after hour in the store’s dark, hot back room. Those sons, Murray and Sol, both served in WWII, and after they returned they were the heirs apparent to the Nathan’s empire. Sol was a card-carrying Communist, Murray an ardent Francophile and an enthusiast of French cuisine. Murray oversaw Nathan’s expansion to locations outside Coney Island, while Sol left the company in 1963 to run the Snacktime hot-dog stand in midtown Manhattan. Snacktime, at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street, was replaced by a porn store in the 1970s, but by then it had made Sol a handful of money.

Nathan would hardly recognize today’s Coney Island. Does anyone under 50 even know the names of Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, Coney’s most famous song and dance duo? (William Handwerker, Lloyd’s cousin, in his rival history of Nathan’s, Nathan’s Famous, claims that Durante and Cantor first suggested to Nathan that he open his own store.) Fred Trump, Donald’s father, demolished Steeplechase in 1966.

Already in Nathan’s day Robert Moses, Coney Island’s biggest nemesis, had taken over large sections of the park area for housing developments surrounded by empty space: Moses wanted pastoral relaxation for the masses, not Coney’s lowbrow amusements. But Moses didn’t triumph completely. Today the raucous spirit of old Coney Island lives on at the tottering Cyclone and at Coney Island USA with its Mermaid Parade and Sideshows by the Seashore freak show. And, not least, at Nathan’s hot-dog eating contest, which this year marks the 100th anniversary of Nathan’s Famous. Check it out on July 4. And grab a hot dog yourself, for old time’s sake.

HOT DOGS, THE JEWISH AMERICAN FAST FOOD: Nathan's Famous: The First 100 Years of America's Favorite Frankfurter Company Paperback, Flatiron Books

The rollercoaster history of the wiener in a bun, in new books on the Coney Island institution, Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs.

Many think that fast food was invented by Ray Kroc when he opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. But it is probably Nathan Handwerker who deserves the distinction, argues his grandson Lloyd Handwerker in his new book Famous Nathan (in 2014 Handwerker made a documentary film with the same name). Nathan founded his hot dog stand, Nathan’s Famous, in 1916 at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island. It was called a “grab joint”—the term “fast food” wouldn’t arrive until the 1950s. “Give ’em and let ’em eat!” Nathan called to his troops as they made “the sweep”: There were no lines at the Nathan’s counter, just a hungry horde served by countermen who served up dogs at the speed of light. By 1916 the hot dog was already a craze in America: Babe Ruth boasted of eating two dozen at a time with a gallon of lemonade.

The inventor of this American gastronomic ritual, Nathan Handwerker, was born in 1892 in Narol, a shtetl in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. The Handwerkers were desperately poor, with 13 children, and Nathan’s father, a shoemaker down on his luck, had to go begging from town to town to make ends meet. At age 11, Nathan got a job in a nearby town at a bakery, where he slept near the oven and had to wake at midnight to prepare the dough.

By 19, Nathan was on a boat headed for America. Six months after his arrival he was working at Max’s Busy Bee, a luncheonette counter in Manhattan. A few months later, Nathan took one of his cousins to a day at the beach. They took the trolley down Ocean Parkway to Coney Island, strolled around the glittering attractions of the world’s most famous amusement park, and bought Cracker Jacks, sometimes called “the first junk food.”

Coney Island stuck in Nathan’s head. He wanted some extra hours on the weekends, when business at Max’s was slow. What better place than Coney Island? He went to Feltman’s restaurant on Surf Avenue, just across from Luna Park, “the Heart of Coney Island,” and got a job as a roll-cutter. Charles Feltman, an immigrant from Germany, was probably the one who, some time in the late 1860s, first served up that brilliant snack: a frankfurter on a warm bun. Feltman’s creation wasn’t called a “hot dog” but a “dachshund sandwich” or a “Coney Island red hot.” Unlike today’s skinless franks, they had sheep’s gut casings tied at both ends like a bratwurst, making a satisfying snap when a hungry customer took the first bite. On a good summer day Feltman’s might serve 40,000 dachshund sandwiches.

Before long, Handwerker had quit his job in the city and opened up his own store in Coney Island. Shrewdly, he lowered the price of his dog to just 5 cents, compared to Feltman’s 10. Most important of all, Nathan ran a grab and go counter, not a sit-down restaurant like Feltman’s. Nathan had intuited the future of American dining: eating on the run, for cheap.

Not long before Nathan’s era Coney Island was an uproarious, criminal place that easily rivaled any old-world den of sin. In its early years, from the 1880s until WWI, Coney was known for gambling, brothels, and all-night bars where many an unwary customer found himself stripped of his cash.  “It is blatant, it is cheap, it is the apotheosis of ridiculous, but it is something more,” the author Reginald Wright Kauffman wrote about Coney Island in 1909. That same year 20 million visitors hit Coney, among them Sigmund Freud. Kaufmann compared Coney Island to the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls: an American landmark. Coney Island had Steeplechase Park, Dreamland (which burned down in 1911), and Luna Park. Steeplechase featured the Human Roulette Wheel and the Barrel of Love, where customers as they entered the park were pitched against each other by the barrel’s moving floor. Dreamland had Lilliputia, a tiny town inhabited by 300 midgets, and a circus with 27 lions at the beck and call of Captain Bonavita, who had “soulful eyes and a tremendous handlebar moustache,” according to Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson’s book Sodom by the Sea: An Affectionate History of Coney Island. Luna Park was an  “Electric Eden” with a quarter of a million light bulbs, “a kind of architectural ‘Little Egypt,’ deliciously sensuous,” wrote John Kasson in his book on Coney Island, Amusing the Million. There were wax museums, Ferris wheels, and roller coasters calculated to “make your girl throw her arms around your neck and yell.”

The designers of Coney Island’s amusement parks had the genius idea of making the crowds themselves the spectacle: excited strangers enjoying promiscuous contact, escaping from the workaday world into a carnivalesque realm where most of the fun cost just a nickel or a dime, from skeet shooting and freak shows to Coney’s most popular attraction, Steeplechase’s Insanitarium. Here a clown dressed as a farmer teased the ladies in the crowd with an electric prod that he gingerly applied to their buttocks. Then the shrieking women passed over a blowhole that lifted up their skirts. Some male customers were known to spend hours in the Insanitarium, sending out from time to time for food. On the stage stood a tree with hot dog branches, some of them adorned with ladies’ bloomers.

The one respectable attraction at Coney was the premature baby incubators run by Dr. Martin Couney, who saved thousands of babies with advanced medical techniques in his immaculate “hatchery.” At least one woman returned each week for years to watch the development of the babies. It cost 25 cents to see the incubators, though Dr. Couney eventually had to cut his prices. In 1940 he groused, “Coney Island is so degraded now—even the hot dogs cost only a nickel—that people bargain to see my babies.”

***

In 1919, Nathan enjoyed an extraordinary stroke of luck: A new El stop, West End Depot, opened at Stillwell and Surf Avenues, a hundred feet from Nathan’s store. After a long train ride almost everyone wanted one of Nathan’s nickel dogs before hitting the beach or the attractions of Steeplechase or Luna Park. On the way back the sunburned visitor would have another hot dog with a pineapple juice or lemonade (also a Nathan’s specialty). As time went on Nathan expanded his operation to include burgers, seafood, knishes, even roast-beef sandwiches. French fries were almost as central to Nathan’s as hot dogs. Fanatical about quality, he made trips to Maine to look for the best potatoes and would buy an entire farm’s crop if he was impressed by it.

Public suspicions about hot dogs were rife even in 1916, when Nathan’s first opened. They stemmed largely from Upton Sinclair’s stomach-churning novel The Jungle of 1906, which detailed the unsanitary practices of slaughterhouses. The hot dog first got its name from a cartoonist named Tad Dorgan, who about the time that Sinclair’s book came out drew a bevy of talking sausages labeled “hot dogs,” playing on the popular rumor that frankfurters were made of canine flesh and other unpalatable substances. Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, Nathan put up a “No horsemeat!” sign on his store. (This was a possibility: At least one factory in Greenpoint supplied Coney with horseflesh wieners.) There was another innovation: Nathan, whose establishment lacked rabbinic supervision, proclaimed that his all-beef franks were “kosher-style,” an ingenious term calculated to reassure his Jewish clientele.

Nathan cared obsessively about quality of food and service. In the beginning he slept in the store, often on potato sacks, and woke up when a customer rang the bell for service, sometimes at three or four in the morning. Nathan and his wife Ida, who worked alongside him, spent virtually all their waking hours in the store. As time went on, he became a shrewd publicity campaigner: For special celebrations when gave out free hot dogs, Nathan made sure they were larger than usual so that new customers, stunned by the size of their dogs as well as their tastiness, would come back soon.

Nathan paid his employees well, quietly gave out free hot dogs to those who couldn’t pay, and hired and promoted minority workers. But he could be a hard man to like, the reader learns from Handwerker’s book. He was a micromanager suspicious of any employee who had a clean apron—not a hard enough worker, Nathan thought. He obsessively checked the garbage cans for food that shouldn’t have been thrown away. And like all restaurant owners, he watched like a hawk for employee theft. One reason that restaurateurs prefer to hire relatives, Handwerker notes in Famous Nathan, is that they think that blood relations will steal less from them than strangers. Still, Nathan’s grandson Steve remarks that Nathan “didn’t like a lot of people in the family. … He saw them as lazy, as non-industrious, or trying to get away with something.” Nathan’s most prized employees were workhorses like himself who during the summer season toiled seven days a week, 10 hours a day. The work ethic had its tragic side: Sidney Handwerker’s sister Rosie got pregnant at the wrong time, during high season, tried to give herself an abortion, and botched the job. She died at Coney Island Hospital.

During WWII Nathan’s was the one spot of light on Coney Island—literally. The rest was subject to a blackout, since German U Boats prowled the Atlantic coast. But Nathan convinced the government that he could shut down his business in 60 seconds in case of an attack, so he was allowed to stay open 24 hours, with the amusement parks and bars shrouded in darkness.

Probably the most tedious job at Nathan’s was counting coins, not just because they were frequently filthy—coated in sand, suntan oil, and grease—but because in prewar days they had to be counted and rolled by hand into paper tubes to take to the bank. This operation happened at the end of the summer, and Nathan’s sons were the chief workers, hour after hour in the store’s dark, hot back room. Those sons, Murray and Sol, both served in WWII, and after they returned they were the heirs apparent to the Nathan’s empire. Sol was a card-carrying Communist, Murray an ardent Francophile and an enthusiast of French cuisine. Murray oversaw Nathan’s expansion to locations outside Coney Island, while Sol left the company in 1963 to run the Snacktime hot-dog stand in midtown Manhattan. Snacktime, at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street, was replaced by a porn store in the 1970s, but by then it had made Sol a handful of money.

Nathan would hardly recognize today’s Coney Island. Does anyone under 50 even know the names of Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, Coney’s most famous song and dance duo? (William Handwerker, Lloyd’s cousin, in his rival history of Nathan’s, Nathan’s Famous, claims that Durante and Cantor first suggested to Nathan that he open his own store.) Fred Trump, Donald’s father, demolished Steeplechase in 1966.

Already in Nathan’s day Robert Moses, Coney Island’s biggest nemesis, had taken over large sections of the park area for housing developments surrounded by empty space: Moses wanted pastoral relaxation for the masses, not Coney’s lowbrow amusements. But Moses didn’t triumph completely. Today the raucous spirit of old Coney Island lives on at the tottering Cyclone and at Coney Island USA with its Mermaid Parade and Sideshows by the Seashore freak show. And, not least, at Nathan’s hot-dog eating contest, which this year marks the 100th anniversary of Nathan’s Famous. Check it out on July 4. And grab a hot dog yourself, for old time’s sake.

A Short Guide to a Long Life by David B Agus MD , Simon & Schuster

Israelis who want to be healthy but don’t know how to or are confused by conflicting reports are advised to read the Hebrew translation of a bestseller by a leading US doctor and researcher.

Mixed summer salad. 


Realizing that a healthy lifestyle can significantly extend life, most Israelis now seem to want a part of it. When the World Health Organization declared that processed meats can cause cancer, supermarket shelves heaped with salami, hot dogs and pastrami suddenly were skipped over by customers.

Salad greens and whole wheat bread have become wildly popular, soft drink sales are down and people boast about how much they exercise.

But while this is a welcome trend, many Israelis are confused by shifting advice from “experts” who dream up the latest “recipes” for changing lifestyles. Should one drink a glass of red wine or take “baby aspirin” daily? Are multivitamins not prescribed by doctors a good thing? Are high-heeled shoes harmful? Should one get a flu shot every year? Are security scanners at airports risky? Are “detoxification” treatments beneficial?

David Agus can fit the bill for Israelis who want clear and rational advice.

Even the Health Ministry in Jerusalem recently admitted that it erred foring almost completely on treating disease, on hospitals and health fund clinics rather than encouraging the population to prevent disease by promoting and conserving good health.

Medicine is undergoing a revolution around the world. Instead of your doctors telling you what to do and treating you based on inflexible, one-size-fits-all rules, empowering patients to take a major part in decision- making and personalized medicine are taking over.

Dr David  Agus, an oncologist, researcher and engineering lecturer at the University of Southern California who helped found two companies for personalized medicine, expands on his bestselling 2012 book The End of Illness, in which he shared the knowledge about keeping healthy that he had accumulated over two decades.

After readers of the first book asked for an easier way to digest this information, the author condensed it into 65 short, simple “rules” based on medical evidence that are designed to help readers share responsibility for their physical and mental health.

“It boggles my mind to think the conversation remains stuck on figuring out how to pay for health care rather than diminishing our need for it,” wrote Agus, a professor of medicine at the Keck School, professor of engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and director of the USC Norris Westside Cancer Center and USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine.

“Each one of us can make a difference if we each are part of reducing the overall demand for healthcare...

When we start living strong, robust lives, we’ll lessen our need for health care, causing the demand to decrease and costs to go down,” he noted. “I’m excited and proud [of the book],” Agus said. “It’s a step forward in my evolution as a physician and scientist.”

The volume, which is accompanied by simple black-on-white line drawings, is divided into three sections: What to Do, What to Avoid and Doctor’s Orders. He clearly wants his readers to change their daily habits and think before they do things that can harm their health.

“At least twice a week,” writes the California oncologist, “I tell a patient that I have nothing left in my arsenal to combat his or her cancer.

It’s over, and in most cases the end is near. That we are no better at treating cancer today, with a few notable exceptions, than we were 50 years ago is maddening. More infuriating still is that many of my patients could have prevented their cancer or other life-altering disease had they just adopted a few healthy habits early on and avoided the ones that lead to illness. The best way to fight not just cancer but all the other ailments that typically develop over time is to prevent them.”

But, writes Agus, “prevention is a hard sell. Think about yourself for a moment: can you see yourself 20, 30, or 40 years from now? We all want to live however we choose today and pay our dues later. In our age of information, where health tips are dispensed like sweets by the media, the work of being healthy has become complicated. It’s common practice to rely on experts to tell us how to live – news stories covering the latest scientific findings, bestselling books that tout one theory or another, government recommendations, claims on labels, and doctors like me. But this advice is so terribly common that it commonly conflicts.

What is a person to do with a hot media account of a new study that finds multivitamins effective in preventing cancer – only to read another media account the next day that says multivitamins can increase your risk of cancer and do nothing for heart health? “My goal is to allow you to take the confusion out of how to live to be healthy. It’s as pure and direct as it gets – less about theory, research, history and science and more about the basic practices to follow in your daily life. Nothing is meant to be a rigid directive.”

Each of Agus’s rules fills a small chapter of two or three pages. (An index and a bibliography are, unfortunately, not included.) The rules are not meant to be universal recommendations, especially when it comes to prescription medications.

The point, he notes, is to raise the issues with your personal physician and your family and think about new direction you want your life to take as you age.

“You are in charge of you. My aim is to help you know when to be introspective and when to question things,” he notes. “If I suggest something that offends you, or that you flatly reject, just move on. At the heart of my message is knowing how to raise awareness about the things you do today that affect your tomorrows.”

HIS FIRST rule is to get to know your body, what your blood pressure and pulse are, how they are affected by what you do, how tense you are, how much you weigh, whether you’re happy, how well you sleep and if you want to change your life.

The second rule is to use a few of the 7,000-and-counting smartphone applications to monitor your health (but don’t overdue this, as it could make you more tense). Another one is eating and sleeping at set times to “regularize” your life (creating homeostatis) and taking prescribed medications for chronic illnesses at set times. If your body is used to having a meal at noon, keep to schedule, as “starving it” for a few hours can cause a rise in the stress hormone cortisol and makes it difficult to keep a healthy, stable weight. Keep your health records on your smartphone (secured by a password) and give access in emergencies to a close relative or friend.

Never smoke! Even one cigarette can trigger debilitating and fatal diseases. Stay away from smokers, as passive smoking is no less dangerous than puffing on nicotine delivery systems by yourself.

As much as possible, eat real, not processed, food, advises Agus.

“This means – with the exception of flash-frozen fruits and vegetables that keep their nutrients – anything that doesn’t come with an officially approved nutrition and facts label is likely to be real, as ironic as that sounds.”

Although vegetables and fruits are beneficial, if they aren’t frozen they quickly lose their nutrients, especially if they have to be transported across long distances to reach your table. Get to know and befriend the employees of your supermarket/grocery so you can get clear answers on whether produce was picked when ripe (good) rather than when unripe, and on whether or not it’s fresh.

Try growing fresh herbs, vegetables and other beneficial things in a pot, planter or garden and integrate them in your meals. Have a glass of wine with dinner (women should drink a maximum of one, and men no more than two glasses in the evening.

“Now we know that moderate alcohol intake, especially from red wine, can reduce one’s risk of heart disease,” Agus writes. But “this benefit does have a caveat, however: drinking can potentially increase one’s risk for breast cancer, and drinking too much is far worse for your heart than being a teetotaler.”

Caffeine from tea and coffee is no longer regarded as harmful as long as it is consumed in moderation and the beverages are not too hot (they should be below 65º C).

“Caffeine, especially from traditional sources and not modern, factory-made concoctions that sell as energy drinks, may actually have protective anti-cancer properties.

But, again, moderation is key.”

Eat at least three servings of cold-water fish – salmon, sardines, tuna, trout, anchovies, herring, halibut, cod, black cod, or mackerel – a week, as they are excellent sources of high-quality protein, healthy fats and naturally occurring vitamins and minerals.

He also advises taking a low-dose aspirin daily, but only after first consulting with your doctor, as it could cause bleeding and other side effects to some patients. In general, “aspirin has far-reaching effects on the body as a whole that go beyond easing our headaches and sore backs.

Many high-quality research studies have confirmed that the use of aspirin not only substantially reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, but it can even ward off a medley of ailments through its anti-inflammatory powers.”

Take care of your teeth and your feet, which if allowed to deteriorate will cause misery. Take note of weird-looking or painful growths or discolorations that emerge on your feet and get them examined and treated. Women should avoid high heels that cause potentially harmful inflammation and instead buy good and comfortable shoes.

Wash your hands regularly, especially after visiting the bathroom, diapering infants or handling raw chicken, meat and fish.

Never skip breakfast, Agus advises, as after fasting all night long your body needs a metabolic jumpstart to begin the day. Hunger in the morning can cause people to become overweight and lack energy.

Skipping those morning calories to lose weight is one of the worst habits a person can develop.

Avoid (as much as possible) trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives, food colorings, artificial flavorings, sweeteners and additives, hydrolyzed protein and fruit juices (concentrate or juiced).

As for commercial places that promise to “detox” your body, forget it, says Agus. Your body is expertly designed to detox naturally thanks to your kidneys, liver, sweat glands, lungs and digestive system. There’s no such thing as an “immune-boosting” anything, he adds. The best way to enhance your immune system is to eat well and stay active. Walk as much as you can to help lose weight and keep it off, as well as challenge your heart and lungs.

As married (or at least cohabiting) couples are known to live longer for a variety of reasons (women especially tend to worry about their male partners’ health and ensure that they get the necessary medical care), living alone is not advisable, Agus notes, adding that having children – despite the stresses – is also recommended for good health.

Regularly stand naked in front of a mirror to look for any changes in your body – front and back – and go to the doctor if there are any.

Strengthen your core and maintain good posture.

“You can tell a lot about someone just by looking at the way he carries himself. With the right posture, anyone can appear younger, thinner and more confident. But these effects aren’t just for vanity’s sake.

Maintaining correct posture may be one of the best-kept secrets for achieving a longer, healthier and more enjoyable life.”

The third and final part of the book sets down specialists to visit and basic tests to undergo during the decades of one’s life from age 20 and onward – and if your doctor doesn’t refer you, find another physician.