A charming, if not revelatory, portrait of a woman determined to bring French cuisine to a wider audience, with emphasis on...
British founder of the bilingual La Varenne cooking school in Paris, veteran cookbook author and world traveler Willan traces her experiences through piquant anecdotes, including favorite recipes that mark salient memories and friendships.
From her Yorkshire roots to a Cambridge education, training in Paris to marriage, American citizenship, entrance into “worldliness,” the creation of La Varenne, envisioned as an alternative to the famed Cordon Bleu, La Varenne’s closure and her later career teaching at venues such as the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, Willan admits to a life often characterized by luck and privilege. With the assistance of Friedman, she narrates with ease, briefly recalling encounters with elite personages and celebrated chefs such as Julia Child. Without self-aggrandizing, such moments vivify a slice of the gastronomic world, particularly during the 1970s, when women were seldom permitted in professional kitchens, nouvelle cuisine was finding its footing, and the explosion of the Food Network had yet to occur. The handful of less-than-flattering scenes—such as those revealing quirks of students and colleagues—are treated with gentle humor, and the author mentions hardships with graceful aplomb. Willan segues between chronology and recipes in a straightforward manner, resulting in an episodic career memoir interwoven with momentous life occasions, from cross-Atlantic moves to weddings and deaths. Compelling chapters on La Varenne in Paris and its courses at Château du Feÿ in Burgundy reveal the pleasures and complications of working in the kitchen, though readers seeking more in-depth details will find these chapters too few.
A charming, if not revelatory, portrait of a woman determined to bring French cuisine to a wider audience, with emphasis on traditional, accessible recipes that respect the intellectual side of cookery. Recommended for Francophiles and culinary enthusiasts.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-64217-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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