A warm story of a life buoyed by resilience, determination, love of family, and food.
A famous chef recalls her adventures in cooking.
Restaurateur, cookbook author, and TV host Bastianich (Lidia’s Celebrate Like an Italian: 220 Foolproof Recipes that Make Every Meal a Party, 2017, etc.) offers an ebullient, nostalgic memoir of her journey to success. Her love for food began in her grandmother’s capacious garden in Busoler, a small village in northern Italy. In 1947, just months after she was born, the region became part of communist Yugoslavia; although rural Busoler saw few effects, her family’s life in the city of Pola changed dramatically. Censorship, repression, and an atmosphere of fear came to a head when her father was suddenly arrested and detained for 30 days. In 1958, her parents decided it was time for the family to escape: first her mother, the author, and her older brother obtained papers for a trip to Trieste, where her mother’s sister lived; a few weeks later, her father arrived after making the perilous border crossing on foot. For the next two years, the family lived in a refugee camp, in barely rudimentary barracks, existing on rationed food. Bastianich was allowed to enroll in a nearby Catholic school, where she helped out in the kitchen: “a culinary transition point,” she writes, because she learned to cook in volume. With astonishingly generous support from Catholic Relief Services, the Red Cross, and Catholic Charities, the family was able to fulfill their dream of settling in America. There, her mother’s home cooking was supplemented by the bounties of American cuisine: “Spam, American cheese, and Wonder Bread were our favorites,” the author gleefully admits. As a teenager, jobs in food service taught her about different recipes and cooks’ techniques. Soon after marrying, she and her husband decided to open an Italian restaurant in Queens, which proved greatly popular. In 1981, they launched a swankier restaurant in Manhattan, earning accolades from food critics and patrons such as Julia Child and James Beard.
A warm story of a life buoyed by resilience, determination, love of family, and food.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3161-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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