A rugged tale of a self-made woman in a high-stress profession.
A celebrated Boston-area chef rehearses her rugged Southie background, her rise into the ranks of the elite restaurateurs, and her various personal doings and demons.
Lynch, who has won multiple James Beard awards and published an award-winning cookbook, Stir: Mixing it up in the Italian Tradition (2009), now operates seven restaurants in the Boston area. In her debut memoir, she begins with her Southie girlhood, where things could have gone very wrong. Her father died early, “of alcoholism, the Irish scourge,” and she grew up in a neighborhood where she shoplifted, swindled, once dodged bullets with Whitey Bulger, stole a city bus and, later, a cab for joy rides, broke both legs in a careless street stunt, endured a sexual horror better left to her description, and dropped out of high school. It was not an auspicious beginning, but Lynch had a talent with food and a fierce determination and an equally fierce work ethic; soon she was moving upward in the culinary ranks. The author expresses justifiable pride in these accomplishments—a pride that rarely drifts into self-celebration—and writes almost breathlessly about her encounters with Julia Child, about cooking for some celebrities, and about her other heroes and mentors in the profession. Lynch is proud of maintaining her Southie roots; she has never lived very far away. She also writes frankly about her personal life. She married a much older man, had a daughter (whom she didn’t see as much as she would have liked due to work responsibilities), had an epiphany about her sexuality, went into counseling for alcohol abuse, and had a near-death experience in surgery. Whenever she writes about food, her passion is evident, and she appends a number of recipes that will surely send some readers straight to the kitchen.
A rugged tale of a self-made woman in a high-stress profession.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9544-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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