Gratitude’s Grace Can Be Itself a Gift

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“It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back,” Laurie Colwin wrote in her bite-size masterpiece, “Home Cooking,” published in 1988. “Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.”

Colwin wasn’t complaining, exactly. She liked dinner parties. But she would also have liked Margaret Visser’s observation, in her new book, “The Gift of Thanks,” that the word “host” is related through Indo-European roots to the words “hostile” and “hostage.” Dinner parties are complicated things, where obligation and gratitude collide and overlap — and sometimes crash and burn.

Ms. Visser writes with as much scholarly wit about dinner and dinner parties — what we put in our mouths, and why and with whom — as any writer alive. She was a foodie before everyone was, and the author of the authoritative books “Much Depends on Dinner” (1988) and “The Rituals of Dinner” (1991), each of which is as crisp and tasty as the day it was published.

The not-very-promising title of Ms. Visser’s new book, “The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude,” and the fact that it is being issued in November, will make some readers think it’s another snoozy, belt-loosening tour of America’s Thanksgiving traditions, from the Pilgrims to whether it’s the L-tryptophan in turkey that makes you want to crawl under the table and take a nap on the carpet after eating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/books/18book.html?th&emc=th