A culinary adventure that’s enhanced by familial and regional histories.
Bumpus (Recipes for Redemption, 2015, etc.) offers a travelogue packed with history and recipes.
In 2002, the author, a retired American family therapist, set out to discover what has held “European families together.” She found that by “focusing on a family’s favorite foods” in interviews, she could capture not only recipes, but key details of family history. This inspired this first book in a series on French and Italian family traditions and accompanying cuisines. Initially traveling with her husband, Winston, and Josiane Selvage, their French friend who served as their translator, Bumpus first went to Reims to visit their first local hosts, Martine and Jean-Claude Zabeé. In the text, she tours the ancient city and discusses the couple’s favorite foods, offers cooking lessons, and reveals local historical detail. A recipe for spinach tortellini, for example, came from Jean-Claude’s mother, who got it from a neighbor from Italy. The coal mines of the area, Bumpus notes, attracted workers from Italy, Poland, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Germany, transforming the area into a multicultural melting pot. Bumpus takes readers on an engaging tour of France’s northeastern regions, including Champagne, Alsace, and Lorraine, and she highlights the local festivities, customs, and food in each. Over the course of this book, Bumpus’ writing is perspicuous and economical, particularly when she shares conversations with her hosts: “They erupted into loud guffaws again as the invisible memories came crashing into our conversation.” The author’s discussions with locals, which make up a sizable portion of the book, are descriptive and successfully place readers in the midst of the conversations, as in this offhand description as Selvage’s friend Christine Lochert discusses doing laundry with her mother: “ ‘Yes, at a lavoir.’ Christine turned from the stove, rinsed her hands at the sink, and grabbed a hand towel before she continued.” The recipes, too, are enticing and detailed, and the book as a whole should appeal to Francophiles and ambitious cooks.
A culinary adventure that’s enhanced by familial and regional histories.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-549-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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