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FASTING AND FEASTING

Name: FASTING AND FEASTING
Author: Adam Federman
ISBN: 978-1-60358-608-5

THE LIFE OF VISIONARY FOOD WRITER PATIENCE GRAY

by Adam Federman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2017

A highly detailed traditional biography of an unconventional woman.

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A journalist examines the life of an important but neglected British-born cookbook author.

Federman tells the story of Patience Gray (1917-2005), who became a world expert on the cuisine of the Salento region of southern Italy. Gray was born into an upper-middle-class family that she later remembered for its Edwardian rigidity and hypocrisy. While a student at the London School of Economics, she began frequenting leftist and artistic circles. She had two children out of wedlock, lived in a small cottage with no electricity or running water, and scratched out a living as a freelance designer and editor. It was during this period that Gray developed an interest in foraging, which she did to supplement a restricted wartime diet. Her first cookbook, Plats du Jour, appeared in 1957. With its emphasis on simple cooking that took its cue from Continental—especially French, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian—cuisine, it became a “standard reference” for “the average home cook.” At the same time, Gray began questioning the new British love affair with consumerism. Along with her partner, Belgian sculpture Norman Mommens, she traveled across Europe in search of a place where she could lead a simpler, more authentic life. The journey took them first to the Greek island of Naxos and then to the extreme south of Italy, where they settled in an old farmhouse called Spigolizzi. Embracing a radically simple lifestyle, they lived off the land, ate according to the seasons, and created art. Federman’s book is meticulously researched, but the amount of detail may prove dry for general readers. Still, the author’s portrait of the complex, fiercely independent woman who reshaped ideas about cooking and food and about what constitutes a life well-lived in a world defined by the “numbing effects” of modernity is intriguing and well-rendered.

A highly detailed traditional biography of an unconventional woman.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-60358-608-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Chelsea Green

Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.