An inspiring account and great fun to read.
In a sparkling memoir, the founder of Restaurant Nora tells of making her own journey into the food world.
From her earliest days growing up in the Austrian Alps, Pouillon was exposed to simple, fresh food. When she came to the United States with her French husband in the 1960s, she was appalled by the drab produce and packaged, processed food found in American supermarkets. A book by British food and cooking writer Elizabeth David introduced her to the importance of fresh, seasonal and natural ingredients and essentially launched her on a new career path. Pouillon quickly learned to cook and then moved on from making dinners for friends to launching a catering business, teaching cooking classes in her kitchen, and becoming chef of a new restaurant, the Tabard Inn, in Washington, D.C. Spurred by the need to earn a living—she had left her husband—the author joined with two partners to open Restaurant Nora in 1979. Finding financing was one problem, and finding local, pesticide-free produce was another, but Pouillon met her challenges head-on. As a measure of her success, in 1999, Restaurant Nora became the first certified organic restaurant in the country; in 2010, it was chosen as the site of a surprise birthday party for Michelle Obama. Much more than a memoir of one woman’s career in food, the book also provides a picture of the growth of the organic food movement in the U.S.—a movement that Nora is still very much a part of. She organizes farmers markets, brings chefs and farmers together, works with consumer advocacy groups, and attends conferences at home and abroad. Pouillon’s story is also a feminist one, showing a woman with young children dealing with a failed marriage, working successfully in a male-dominated business and helping other women to succeed in it.
An inspiring account and great fun to read.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-35075-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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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