A pleasantly rendered if not earth-shattering reality check for anyone with restaurant-owning envy.
A popular food blogger and her husband open a Seattle pizzeria, testing the limits of their marriage in the process.
For years, Wizenberg (A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, 2009) has been charming readers with her blog, Orangette, an enviable world full of vintage wood, rustic tableware and beautifully photographed recipes. It was through her blog that she also found her husband, a pizza-addicted New Yorker who, upon joining her in Seattle, missed his beloved Brooklyn pizzeria, Di Fara. When he proposed that they open their own restaurant, named Delancey, the author was on board, though neither had considered how back-breakingly hard that dream was going to be. Literally building from the ground up, the couple suddenly had to contend with “shot-blasting” concrete floors, impressing health department inspectors, creating a wood-burning oven entirely from scratch, and finding a place to store 30 vinyl chairs, bought at auction from a bowling alley. Just about to run out of startup money, they eventually opened, but the troubles were hardly over—as it turns out, hiring and managing a staff also isn’t as harmonious as they’d hoped. For Wizenberg, who’d been juggling her first book launch with supporting her husband’s dream, something had to give. After a particularly contentious night, she decided that the only way to save the restaurant and her marriage was to recuse herself from the equation. As always, Wizenberg is at her best when discussing the food, and though she quickly determines how small a part of restaurant ownership that is, she still manages to sprinkle fairy dust on everything—from the homemade cold meatloaf sandwiches she makes after a hard day of construction to the Vietnamese rice noodle salad she was inspired to create after months of similar takeout lunches.
A pleasantly rendered if not earth-shattering reality check for anyone with restaurant-owning envy.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5509-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
