Pizza in New Haven by Colin M. Caplan #
Pizza in New Haven, Colin M. Caplan. My brother got me this book as a gift several years ago because we grew up 40 minutes away from New Haven and would go somewhat regularly for pizza (has to be Sally’s for me). An upcoming trip to New Haven caused me to finally sit down and read the book. While Colin Caplan certainly loves New Haven and its pizza history and has done a great service to many people and families in documenting the history of pizza in New Haven—and many photos of old restaurants, people, advertisements, and the like add a lot of context and character—this book leaves much to be desired. In my day job as a linguistics professor, when discussing pragmatics (language use in context) over semantics (literal meaning), I often joke about how conversation and discourse is much more complex than randomly sampling true sentences and uttering them. Unfortunately, this book often felt like the latter. Tons of very detailed facts were sequenced together, but not stitched together into any kind of larger historical arc or story. This lack of narrative arc also caused the book to lack structure; it was unclear why certain stories were placed where they were, or why certain chapters followed the previous ones. In addition to quite a few typos, there were basic issues that gave the impression the book had not been proof-read; for example, “coke-fired” ovens were discussed from the very beginning, but not explained until page 189. Several stories were repeated, often just pages apart. I did still learn a lot, including seeing the impact of Redevelopment (plowing neighborhoods for highways, as in too many US cities) in New Haven, but was certainly left wanting. (I’m somewhat ashamed that this was my first print book of the year, in September.) Grade: C+