Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is a subtle and persuasive account of the nineteenth-century novel’s reliance on shifting relations between “the alimental gentleman” and what that gentleman eats and drinks (10). the book works on two levels. First, it uses the fact that everybody has to eat to get at several ways in which “the table is the site of self-fashioning” in the nineteenthcentury novel (12). Food and drink become a conceptual basis on which Hyman places overlapping ideas about class, gender, space, place, nation, and desire. An important part of the book’s method is thus a literary anthropologist’s faith that looking at a society’s rules for preparing and consuming food reveals patterns and values that govern that society in general. Second, the book is a specific engagement with the nineteenthcentury gentleman’s fraught dependence on a changing food culture that both fueled and was a self-conscious index of modern life. noting that much has already been written “on women and their appetites” (10), Hyman instead focuses on the vague but pervasive figure of the gentleman, a figure whose claim to gentlemanliness drifts notoriously back and forth from the economic, the social, and the ethical. with this, Hyman adds to and makes historically specific thinking about the ways in which eating helps to produce differences between self and other, inside and outside, and embodiment and disembodiment in the work of norbert elias, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mary Douglass, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as critics like Joseph Litvak and Mary Ann O’Farrell. Hyman is most concerned with the role food and drink play in relation to the rise of industrial modernity, a phenomenon associated as much with coffee and cocaine