A deeply felt and lovingly remembered memoir.
An African-American culinary scholar remembers the years she spent among an “extraordinary circle of friends” that included James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Nina Simone.
Harris met her greatest love, Samuel Clemens Floyd III, when she was a young French professor in New York. He was 15 years her senior and a former staff writer at Newsweek who taught English at Queen’s College. Youthful insecurity made Harris, a well-educated and accomplished woman, question their relationship: “I’m still not sure just how or why Sam settled on me; perhaps my naïveté attracted him.” Dazzled by Floyd’s sophistication, “quicksilver personality,” and the down-home Southern simplicity that underlay both, Harris was soon drawn into her lover’s remarkable circle of black luminaries. She made lifelong connections with writers Baldwin, Rosa Guy, and Louise Meriwether and made acquaintance with other black artists, including Simone. She and Clemens enjoyed the burgeoning New York City culinary scene of the 1970s and traveled extensively to Haiti, Africa, and France, where they indulged in lively intellectual exchanges and delicious food as well as the friendship of notables like economist Mary Painter and her chef husband, Georges Garin. Along the way, Harris developed a passion for food, which she discovered Clemens’ great friend Maya Angelou also shared. She began writing columns for Essence magazine and, eventually, published two well-regarded cookbooks. As the years passed and she grew more secure in her own identity, she and Clemens drifted apart. Yet her respect and feelings for him never faded, even after she learned that he had contracted AIDS and had deliberately hidden his bisexuality from her throughout their relationship. Peppered throughout with favorite recipes, Harris’ book is a warm recollection of life-changing friendships and personal connections. At the same time, her story offers a unique perspective on some of the greatest African-American intellectuals and artists of the modern era.
A deeply felt and lovingly remembered memoir.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2590-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
PROFILES
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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