Mosler’s lively and accessible writing style joyfully captures the satisfaction gained by trusting your instincts and...
Building on the success of her blog, Taxi Gourmet, Mosler recounts the story of her transcontinental search for a vocation, which propelled the author into dancing in tango clubs in Buenos Aires, becoming a cab driver in New York City, and falling in love with the city of Berlin.
Initially, the author’s love of food led her to believe her destiny involved running a restaurant. But while working on the line at a San Francisco French-Asian fusion restaurant, Mosler faced the fact that her competence in the kitchen wasn’t up to the requirements of her dream job. Yet as her friends began settling down and buying homes, Mosler embarked on a different track. The author departed for Buenos Aires, intent on writing about food from a different perspective while indulging her love of Latin dance, especially the tango. After a disastrous night on the dance floor, Mosler flagged down one of the thousands of taxis trolling the city and requested the driver take her to his favorite restaurant. At first, her desire sprang from a growling stomach and the embarrassing tango episode. However, following the charming gustatory experience, Mosler pondered the idea of repeating the experience: “What if I hopped into a random cab every week and asked the taxista to take me to his favorite place to eat?” Soon, the author was blogging about her taxi-culinary adventures for family and friends, and her ask-the-driver technique provided her with a unique route into the life of the city, its foodways, and its people. Mosler delightfully conveys her nervousness and other feelings she experienced during her excursions—e.g., during the first days of driving her own cab or her surprise at the success of her Kickstarter campaign funding her move to Berlin.
Mosler’s lively and accessible writing style joyfully captures the satisfaction gained by trusting your instincts and seeking out new places, food, and people.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87031-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
