A candid, entertaining look at an often bizarre new gustatory landscape.
A memoir of a life in food that is as much a reminiscence of family and travel as a discursive account of 20 years of culinary trends and developments.
In the summer of 2000, Platt succeeded Gael Greene as restaurant critic of New York magazine, well aware of the haughty, slightly absurd image the food critic held in the public imagination. The former travel writer was nonetheless a natural “gastronaut.” The son of a career diplomat, Platt and his brothers had grown up at various posts, chiefly in Asia, with stopovers in his native New York as well as Washington, D.C. The Platt family dove into each food world with the gusto of omnivorous feeders. Platt learned early on how to escape the expatriate cocoon and dive into a culture. Little has changed: “I've always equated the glamor of travel and living in far-off lands with the eternal joys of a good meal.” The author fell in love with the theatrical pageantry of restaurants, and he would come to see a critique as “part cultural essay, part personal diary, part service journalism, and part travel and cultural commentary.” A James Beard Award winner, Platt writes that the strange Kabuki world of the restaurant critic, a once-rarefied realm, has given way—for good and ill—to the democratizing influences of social media and internet culture, which he chronicles with some distaste (and grudging appreciation). The self-styled “Grumpy Adam” can be as admiring as he is dyspeptic, but his disquisitions on the art and practice of criticism sometimes slip into excessive self-deprecation. Still, his tone is comradely, offering not only an elegy for a vanished golden era of New York cuisine and the traditional expense-account food junket, but also a lament over the disappearance of so many gifted old-school critics, many of whom have been replaced by manic bloggers.
A candid, entertaining look at an often bizarre new gustatory landscape.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-229354-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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