An interesting life rendered in a flawed manner.
A chef tells how she overcame family dysfunction and substance abuse to become the proprietor of a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Regan grew up a tomboy on an Indiana farm “dropped smack in 10 acres of cornfields, wild edibles, and Native American burial grounds with pulsating ghosts.” From a mother who saw “food [as] love,” she learned how to cook and can from scratch. From her father, whose mother owned a small cafe, she learned how to roast meat on homemade grills and forage for wild mushrooms. For most of her childhood, she lived with her colorful, raucous family, watching her parents grow apart, threaten divorce, and then come back together again. Relief at having her family back came at the cost of leaving the farm she loved but that her mother no longer wanted to maintain. Adolescence proved to be as painful as it was forgettable: “High school sucked a small flaccid dick.” At first, Regan, who questioned both her gender identity and sexuality, tried to fit in. Then she rebelled, drinking, crashing cars, and going to jail twice before graduating high school and eventually going to live in Chicago. Up-and-down relationships and a string of restaurant jobs helped her survive the difficult years after her parents’ divorce and her alcoholic sister’s untimely death in a Florida jail. Wanting to do more with her life than “[wake] up in cells or beds or other places I didn’t want to be,” the author launched a successful restaurant business that she initially ran from her own home, featuring dishes she not only created, but for which she also foraged ingredients. The basic narrative elements that comprise Regan’s story—a misfit hero fumbling and bootstrapping her way to culinary fame—are compelling. However, the temporally fractured nature of the story makes it difficult to follow, and the unevenness of the writing—sometimes lively, sometimes messy and unconsidered—makes for less than satisfying reading.
An interesting life rendered in a flawed manner.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-57284-267-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Agate Midway
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
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