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
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
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
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