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
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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