Like Child and her recipes, Prud'homme focuses on theme and variation, eschewing a straight chronology for an affectionate...
Prud'homme (Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2013, etc.) explores the life of his great aunt, Julia Child (1912-2004), America’s first celebrity chef and an enduring cultural icon.
Co-author of her autobiography, My Life in France, the author demonstrates how Child, a cultural mediator between France and America in the first act of her career, combined authoritative knowledge with an uninhibited, TV-ready personality in activating the taste buds of a nation. He goes behind the scenes to chronicle the development of her many TV series, from the seminal The French Chef to Dinner at Julia's, as well as her influential, often groundbreaking cookbooks. The book centers in large part on the Childs' years in Cambridge, detailing her long association with WGBH, Boston's flagship public TV station, and a rather rocky relationship with PBS. Her husband, Paul, is credited as an equal partner in a creative joint venture, making manifest contributions as editor, mentor, photographer, confidant, and sommelier to her career while studiously avoiding the limelight. Along with a dollop of culinary arcana, Prud'homme folds some surprises into his soufflé, showing a woman of sometimes-contradictory culinary convictions: Child the passionate defender of French tradition who was a relentless agent of change in America and Child the (initial) adversary of nouvelle cuisine who eventually found classical French gastronomy too limiting. We also meet Child the driven, tireless worker, a pragmatist who put herself into the reader's or viewer's shoes; the committed teacher and steadfast friend; the kitchenware junkie; the incorruptible opponent of product plugs; the staunch defender of science who credulously championed flawed food studies; and the nonconformist with a traditionalist streak. The author also gives room to Child's frequent collaborator Simone “Simca” Beck, longtime editor/midwife Judith Jones, and chef Jacques Pépin.
Like Child and her recipes, Prud'homme focuses on theme and variation, eschewing a straight chronology for an affectionate but journalistically scrupulous backstage account of Child's influential second act.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35175-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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