“Good Bread Is Back will become the canonical book on 20th century French baking, not only in English but in French too.”
(The Fresh Loaf) “[F]or anyone with a broad interest in bread, the book is an excellent and comprehensive look at the product and how it has shaped, and been shaped by, French society.”
(Bakers Journal) “[Kaplan is] not just the leading authority on French bread but the conscience of French baking-a conscience that does not hesitate to tug. . . . Good Bread is Back [is] a punchy, compendious account of how French baking returned to its artisanal roots and sparked a revival in quality crusts.”
- Michael Steinberger (Financial Times) “This is very much a bread nerd's book. . . . It is a fascinating story, and Kaplan is the person to tell it.”
- David Auerbach (Independent Weekly) “A good baguette is as integral a part of French cultural heritage as Paris and Lacan, and this beautiful book forms a fitting tribute, researched, written and illustrated with finesse.”
(French Book News) “Professor Kaplan’s new book is a tasty meditation on the many pleasures of good bread, wrapped in an object lesson on the evolution of artisanal production. Many readers who do not share the author’s passion for the technical aspects of breadmaking will nonetheless be impressed by it. And anyone who has ever stood in a French bakery savoring the scent and admiring the array of delectable brown loaves will be heartened by his optimistic conclusion that good bread will always drive out bad. It is, as Kaplan might say, a delicious book with a beautifully gilded crust and a pearly, chewy crumb.”
- Steve Zdatny H-France (H-Net Reviews) “Students of French history and food will find [Good Bread is Back] completely absorbing and it should be required reading for any professional.”
(Library Journal) “Throughout this work, Kaplan powerfully demonstrates the symbolic charge of bread as it is ‘’deeply bound up with the basic values of sociability and well-being, with sacred and secular in communion’ (304). . . . Kaplan reminds us through bread, that bread sums up the human experience.”
- Samuel Snyder (Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics) "[A] book every serious American bread enthusiast ought to read. . . . A good storyteller, Kaplan describes his large cast of characters in sharp detail, with numerous protagonists and antagonists, and does a fine job of capturing the center of good in each of them."
- Peter Reinhart (Gastronomica) "A magnificent combination of polemic and scholarship, it asks how the superlative French bread of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries gave way to the disappointing industrial loaves of the 1960s onwards; and how these in turn, have been happily supplanted by a new generation of artisananal baguettes, batards and boules."
- Bee Wilson (TLS)
