Delectable reading.
A journalist’s account of the unexpectedly rich life she and her French husband made together after leaving Paris for a small town in southern France.
When a very pregnant Bard (Lunch in Paris, 2010) and her husband, Gwendal, visited Céreste, it was to see the village that had been home to a French poet and Resistance leader named René Char. After they chatted with the daughter of Char’s wartime lover, they discovered that her family was about to sell the house where the poet had lived. The pair bought the house on impulse the next day, certain only of the fact that Céreste was “where [they] would become a family.” A neighbor's move-in gift of a basketful of homegrown vegetables became the symbol of what would quickly become the couple’s organizing principle: food. Not only was it something that, in all its delicious Provençal variety, was one of Bard’s “central pleasures.” It was also the way she would continue to forge an identity for herself apart from her Brooklyn-born mother and her American supermarket tastes. Through sharing recipes—many of which she includes in this book, as in her previous book—Bard negotiated and built relationships with her French friends and extended family. When she realized that pain from her own childhood was preventing her from bonding with her son, cooking with her child became the way she repaired the rift between them and healed her own heart. Gwendal also found his own salvation in food. Faced with a decision to rejoin the corporate world and become an unhappy “cog in the wheel,” he decided instead to open an artisanal ice cream shop with his wife. Like the Provençal food and lifestyle it celebrates, Bard’s book is one to be savored slowly and with care.
Delectable reading.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-24616-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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