Satisfying, but for dedicated Fisherphiles only.
Exhaustive biography gets behind the myths the acclaimed food writer herself perpetuated about her life, loves, and travels.
Fisher practically invented her own literary genre, argues Reardon (M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters, 1994, etc.), by writing about our hungers, what satisfies them, and how food relates to the larger human experience. More than a dozen books showcased her gifts as a master storyteller, from Serve It Forth (1937), which the Chicago Daily Tribune hailed as “a delicate emulsion” of culinary history and personal anecdotes, to her magnum opus, The Art of Eating, a collection “on the verge of being a novel,” in the opinion of critic Alan Brien. But Fisher’s life was marked by more upheaval than her public persona suggested, and she tended to embellish her past. (The writer enjoyed it, claims daughter Kennedy, when “people thought of her as someone she wasn’t.”) As a teenager in California, she subbed for vacationing reporters at her dad’s newspaper and viewed cooking as a way to get attention from her otherwise self-absorbed family members. (“It made me feel creative and powerful.”) Her first marriage to a Presbyterian minister’s son fell apart, despite her claims to the contrary, thanks to her romance with next-door neighbor Dillwyn Parrish. After Parrish developed Buerger’s disease, lost a leg, and shot himself to death, Fisher embarked on a series of affairs, culminating in the birth of daughter Anna and marriage to New York City socialite Donald Friede, which also ended in divorce. Her chilly relations with her children and subsequent personal problems—she was by turns isolated, needy, and cruel—contrasted with her growing status as an American culinary icon on par with her close friends Julia Child and James Beard. Reardon’s account of Fisher’s life makes for a rewarding but dense read: casual foodies, especially those more interested in her writing accomplishments than her family life, may not find the 544-page slog worth the trouble.
Satisfying, but for dedicated Fisherphiles only.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-86547-562-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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