Nothing too compelling, but this epistolary testament to a close friendship will surely appeal to Child fans.
The letters exchanged between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto from 1952 to ’61, as the former was creating the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961).
During many years of research, culinary historian and biographer Reardon (M.F.K. Fisher Among the Pots and Pans, 2008, etc.) had collected most of DeVoto’s letters to Child, but it wasn’t until 2006, when the Avis DeVoto papers were unsealed after 30 years archived in a Cambridge library, that she read those written by Child. Of the more than 400 letters they mailed to each other between 1952 and ’88, Reardon has selected those that capture the first nine years of their friendship, making only minor adjustments (accents for French words, punctuation for clarity). Child’s letters were written from the myriad cities where her husband was stationed for his work in the U.S. State Department: Paris, Marseille, Washington, D.C., Oslo and elsewhere; DeVoto’s were all postmarked in Cambridge, Mass. The women’s correspondence began when Child wrote to DeVoto’s husband, journalist Bernard DeVoto, praising his Harper’s article about knives, and it was Avis, not he, who responded. Living in Paris, Child had been consumed by an obsession with French food and was teaching cooking classes and writing a book on the subject. She sent the first draft to Avis, who played a vital role in getting it published. Even before they met in person, DeVoto and Child formed a bond strong enough to qualify as “soul mate[s].” Rooted in a shared love of great food, their exchanges cover recipes, family news, all the quotidian ins and outs of their lives, emotions, enthusiasm for the book and all the many trials of finding it a publisher and seeing Julia’s endeavor brought to light in America. The letters are detailed, engaging, witty, warmhearted, and immensely honest, and the women's comfort in their friendship is evidenced by the total lack of pretense and the vast quantity of letters they shared, most of which are signed off with love.
Nothing too compelling, but this epistolary testament to a close friendship will surely appeal to Child fans.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-41771-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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