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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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