Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes

Biographies that praise and simplify to the point of insipidity, combined with fewer than 80 recipes (several with only circumstantial connections to their subjects) and Berry's relentlessly self-congratulatory description of his research (we're even told he has his own Greek lexicon) cause this book to drown in mediocrity. Berry ( The New Vegetarians ) divides 26 vegetarians into three categories: ``immortals,'' like Pythagoras and Christ; ``visionaries,'' such as 19th-century nutritionist Sylvester Graham and Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappe; and ``contemporaries,'' like Cloris Leachman and I. B. Singer. Bronson Alcott's eccentricities are whitewashed almost out of recognition, and we even learn how George Bernard Shaw's oeuvre could have been improved: a Shaw play on vegetarianism might have started ``a worldwide dietary revolution.'' At least the savory rice and lentil curry comes from Shaw's own kitchen. That's preferable to the ``imaginative recreation'' of Leo Tolstoy's baked macaroni en casserole that banishes cheese in favor of tahini, bringing it in line with the nondairy diet preferences of Rynn Berry. (Jan.)