A literary meal both luscious and lively—and essential to understanding our vacillating love affair with the French.
A thoroughly researched account of how Americans fell in and out of love with French cuisine and cooking.
Cultural historian Spring (Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, 2011, etc.) returns with a stunning account of six eclectic, electric personalities, a group of Americans who helped popularize French cooking in America in the middle of the 20th century. Some are names that even the most casual cook knows (Julia Child, Alice B. Toklas), but others will be recognizable mostly to oenophiles or those who know a bit of kitchen custom and/or history (M.F.K. Fisher, Alexis Lichine, A.J. Liebling, Richard Olney). Throughout, the author combines biography and cultural history. He tells us the relevant pieces of his principals’ biographies—focusing, of course, on their gastronomical work—and how each affected the swelling interest in all things French. He also credits numerous others, including John F. and Jackie Kennedy, for influencing public opinion. Although Spring is mostly generous in his assessments, he does do some occasional slicing, especially on Fisher, whom he basically calls a liar—though he recognizes that her artful lying was a form of storytelling. It is fascinating to read how these six figures discovered French food, wine, and cooking and how each developed a specialty and then brought that knowledge to a public eager to read about it all—or, in the case of Child, who had a long-running show on PBS, to see it on TV. Spring also discusses the deaths of each of his subjects, their legacies, and the ultimate implosion of the fascination with French culture, brought on largely by the turmoil of the late 1960s, both in the U.S. and France.
A literary meal both luscious and lively—and essential to understanding our vacillating love affair with the French.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-10315-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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