Indulge in this memoir of marrow and butter, knowing there is always a bitter green to balance the taste.
A gratifying year spent tackling the art of French cooking.
On the eve of her 30th birthday, Powell realized that she hated her life: She worked at a job with a bunch of Republicans she (mostly) loathed and she was nearing the moment when she would have to make the jump to have a baby. Her life was not on the trajectory she imagined, and she was growing increasingly depressed. In a moment of desperation, she decided to take on a project that might help distract her—and what an undertaking it was. Powell would prepare all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Over the course of the next year, this project served as her lifeline. For each elaborate (or elaborately named) dish that she created—dishes like tournedos sautés aux champignons and quartiers de fonds d’artichauts au beurre—there were family and friends (and one very patient husband, Eric) to share them with. At the Eric’s suggestion, Powell started a blog to chronicle her successes and disasters, her triumphs and crises (there were many, in each category). Eventually, the media was drawn to her quest, but celebrity was not what Powell was after (unless it got her out of a lousy job). For all her fussing and neuroses, Powell is a softy a heart, appreciating Child because, she says, Child “wants you to remember that you are human, and as such are entitled to that most basic of human rights, the right to eat well and enjoy life.” Powell clearly enjoyed hers, with all its madness and pleasures.
Indulge in this memoir of marrow and butter, knowing there is always a bitter green to balance the taste.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-10969-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
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
SEEN & HEARD
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