A moving book that highlights a long-gone world.
Cooking instructor and cookbook author Kitty Morse tells of discovering her great-grandparents’ memories and recipes in this history-filled cookbook.
The author was born in Casablanca, Morocco, shortly after World War II to a British aviation officer and a French administrative assistant. She knew that her maternal grandfather—her warm, gregarious pépé, Armand Darmon—came from an Algerian Sephardic family, but she knew little of her reserved, French-born mémé, Suzanne. It wasn’t until decades later, while cleaning out her deceased mother’s Oceanside, California, home, that the author came across a suitcase bearing a trove of documents bearing the mysterious title Les Archives Complètes des Familles Lévy-Neymarck. These documents told the story of her mémé’s parents—a secular Jewish doctor and his wife living in Châlons-sur-Marne at the time of the Nazi occupation. They include Dr. Prosper Lévy’s wartime diary and his wife Blanche Neymarck’s book of recipes. It was a bittersweet discovery, indeed: sweet because the author has written several cookbooks, and bitter because neither of her great-grandparents survived the occupation. With this archive, she effectively opens a window onto life in France before and during the war, elegantly tracing the familiar connections between love, grief, and food. It’s a project that was begun by her mother, Nicole,who transcribed some of the documents without ever mentioning their existence to the author: “I’d never understood what lay behind the intermittent bouts of depression that plagued my mother throughout her life,” Morse writes. “How I wished she’d shared Les Archives…with me, as difficult as that might have been.” Prosper’s diary covers the first year of the occupation, after which poor health prevented him from writing further; Blanche’s recipes are a mix of French and Alsatian dishes, from hearty stews and casseroles to wine-heavy preparations of duck, chicken, and fish. The desserts and baked goods section is the most extensive and alluring part of the book—featuring “Beignets de Carnaval” and “Alsatian Brioche”—but the entire work is richly illustrated with the author’s husband Owen Morse’s full-color photographs.
A moving book that highlights a long-gone world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780578361642
Page Count: 210
Publisher: La Caravane Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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