A cozy, touching story.
American journalist Bard traces her relationship with her French husband from the first lunch date to the present, framing the narrative around mouthwatering menus.
The book starts out vanilla, but the author’s charming narrative and penetrating insights quickly add a subtle complexity that will captivate readers. Having met her future husband Gwendal at an academic conference in London, Bard soon invented an excuse to visit Paris. Eventually she moved in to Gwendal’s tiny apartment and began her initiation into Parisian life. She pleasantly details her joys and obstacles, including her difficulties with grumpy fishmongers and complicated meat-market lines, and she provides poignant revelations about cultural differences that are alternately easy to overcome and seemingly insurmountable. The idea of love conquering all is certainly a cliché, but the author’s unique voice prevents her story from becoming stale. One of the most enlightening aspects of French culture that Bard reveals is the fact that in Paris, the customer is not always right. Whether it’s the chef for the wedding hors d’oeuvres or the doctor treating her father-in-law’s colon cancer, the author learned that one must bow to the opinion of the professional. Ultimately, Paris had much to offer Bard, including lessons in how to cook delectable meals with whatever is at hand, or the simplicity of sitting in a café and relaxing with a coffee and croissant. Despite the many delicious recipes, the motif of food only provides a loose framework for the book, leaving the narrative somewhat disjointed in places. This does not, however, diminish Bard’s entertaining voice.
A cozy, touching story.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04279-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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