A heartening memoir of good food and tough love with a few down-home recipes thrown in.
A memoir of an untrained chef with an English degree who set out to temper bad behavior by serving good food and to change junk-food die-hards into foodies.
When Barnes took a job as a cook for the Alpha Sigma Phi house on the University of Washington campus, she knew “that ‘frat boy’ was shorthand for ‘arrogant, drunk, and disorderly,’ ” but she didn’t know that house chefs were generally glorified warmers of precooked meals. Her new job came with major challenges. The kitchen—with its “archaic gas range,” freezer held together with duct tape and a rat in the pantry—was a nightmare, requiring critter control and rigorous scrubbing and disinfecting. Though frat-house jobs were on the bottom rung of the chef hierarchy, for Barnes, a job in which customers respected her was a dream compared with her stint as a chef for a demanding family or at a cafe, where the health violations were frequently flagrant. At least in the Alpha Sig kitchen, she called the shots—often laced with expletives. When the rowdy, grungy frat-house atmosphere, the guys ignoring her kitchen rules and the uncooperative vendors got to her, she vented. Thankfully, her humor, honesty and a steadfast vision save the book from becoming one long rant. Resistant at first, the guys grew to love her food. Eventually, she gained the respect and friendship of the vendors, and the reputation of her table grew. Sorority girls often raided her pantry for leftovers and left fan notes. The book is as much about nourishment as it is food. Barnes’ affection for the fraternity brothers carries the narrative. It wasn’t all about consuming, it was about connecting,” she writes.
A heartening memoir of good food and tough love with a few down-home recipes thrown in.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2477-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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
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
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