Grateful Dead Book Reviews

Elizabeth Zipern’s Cooking with the Dead: Recipes and Stories from Fans on the Road is an ethnography disguised as a cookbook. It preserves a vanished ecosystem of cooks, vendors, travelers and improvisers whose contributions rarely appear in histories of the Grateful Dead. Between the fall of 1993 and the fall of 1994, Zipern traveled from show to show collecting recipes and interviewing the people who fed the touring community.

Centered around fresh ingredients and plant-based meals, the book is divided into sections loosely tied into the flow of a Grateful Dead show. The first centers on dishes one might expect from the parking lot scene, exploring one of the great under-documented features of Deadhead culture. Before camping was pushed to the margins of the scene in the early 1990s, the parking lot was an adventurous, globally flavored culinary village operating out of the trunks of hundreds of ca

With Cornell ’77, Peter Conners takes on the most widely distributed, discussed, debated and dissected Grateful Dead show ever performed. The subject comes with baggage. Shortly after being disseminated through the wider tape-trading network, 5/8/77 began to be treated by some as sacred text. After the show was later repackaged by the entertainment industry into CDs, vinyl and lavish box sets, I fretted Conners might fall into the trap of typing into an echo chamber. He does