Not quite at the level of Michael Ruhlman’s superb The Making of a Chef (1997), but the current adoration of foodie culture...
An inspiring tale of picking up the pieces…with a spatula.
After completing The Beatles (2005), a 900-page book that cost him eight years and an untold amount of money, Spitz found his life meandering off the rails. He was “bumping around like a stray dog, just reading, cooking for friends, and taking long walks on the beach—that is, doing nothing.” His 14-year marriage had ended, and a new relationship was foundering. The only place he found solace was in the kitchen; cooking had been a fulfilling, comforting activity for him since childhood. If his kitchen at home made him feel a little better, Spitz reasoned, then a kitchen on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean would make him feel a lot better. Off to Europe he went, beginning a food-filled journey that took him from Nice and the French towns of Agen and Théoule to various Tuscan villages and south to the mountaintop aerie of Sant’Agata. Back home, thanks to his therapeutic culinary lessons, he was calmer, wiser and stuffed. Appealingly, Spitz spends as much time discussing people as cuisine. When he does write about the food, however, he’s eloquent, and the inclusion of recipes throughout the book serves as a Greek—or rather, a French or Italian—chorus.
Not quite at the level of Michael Ruhlman’s superb The Making of a Chef (1997), but the current adoration of foodie culture practically guarantees a large, appreciative audience for this warmhearted memoir/travelogue.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06059-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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