For those addicted to following the rise, fall and eventual resurrection of celebrity chefs, Liebrandt’s story will be an...
Acclaimed chef Liebrandt and Friedman (Knives at Dawn: America's Quest for Culinary Glory at the Bocuse d'Or, the World's Most Prestigious Cooking Competition, 2009) collaborate in a “literary tasting menu,” chronicling the chef’s bumpy yet supersonic rise in the culinary world and the prestigious chefs who influenced his career.
Packed with a bounty of dazzling recipes and photos and told chronologically, Liebrandt’s story begins in London. At the age of 13, the author began washing dishes in a new restaurant, prophetically called New York, New York. By the age of 24, Liebrandt had become the youngest chef to receive a three-star review from the New York Times, for his work at Atlas in Greenwich Village. The author recounts his stints with the famous chefs he apprenticed under while sharpening his skills, always pondering his next move. “It was no small thing to have worked for Marco Pierre White, Richard Neat, Raymond Blanc, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten all by the age of twenty-two,” he writes. “The Big Question in my life was as enticing as it was daunting: What next?” By 1999, Liebrandt’s desire to continue his innovative style and his outspoken personality propelled him to New York, where he finally moved to the next level. “I was only twenty-four. Relatively young to be handed the keys to the kitchen of a place like Atlas. But something told me I could handle it,” he writes. The author’s recipes reflect his idiosyncratic approach to “The Food,” which serves as “the object of an existential quest, to be pursued at the expense of just about everything else,” and they are not for the timid. Adventurous cooks can indulge their tastes and test their culinary skills with Duck Leg Torte, Beer Brined Pork Shoulder, Beet Hibiscus-Glazed Foie Gras or White Truffle Gnudi with Abalone Butter, among other decadent dishes.
For those addicted to following the rise, fall and eventual resurrection of celebrity chefs, Liebrandt’s story will be an essential ingredient on their reading menu.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3416-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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