Reichl (who “raced through electric streets” in Thailand) likes it in the fast track—but she has a tendency to hog the lane...
More memoirs from Gourmet editor Reichl (Tender at the Bone, 1998, etc.), highly focused (on the food world of Berkeley, New York, and Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s) and grindingly self-absorbed.
In the late 1970s, Reichl was married to a winsome environmental artist named Doug, living in Berkeley, and reviewing restaurants for New West magazine. She embarked on a torrid affair with another food writer, Colman Andrews, and we are treated to detailed account of this liaison, in which she comes across as both dishonest and irresponsible (while the hapless Andrews appears merely as a pompous gasbag). They fell in love, they went to Paris. He dumped her. She traveled to China. There, thankfully, the foreignness of the land washed over her, and the wonder of it all informed her narrative. Reichl can turn a lovely phrase (“I followed her through the dark living room and into the kitchen, thinking how very blue the flower tasted”), and she can also swap hackneyed comparisons with the best of them (truffles, for example, “tasted the way a forest smells in autumn”). There is a terrific interlude when she visits M.F.K. Fisher and learns of her teaching at Piney Woods in 1964, but by then way too much time is spent detailing a disastrous visit by her mother to her next lover’s pad. Another travel episode, to Thailand, is a winner, but her coverage of Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois opening and her courtship by the Los Angeles Times will have readers suffocating in all things Ruth. Just when you've had enough comes a disarming chapter on her tragic adoption of a baby girl (who was subsequently returned to the birth mother against the author's wishes).
Reichl (who “raced through electric streets” in Thailand) likes it in the fast track—but she has a tendency to hog the lane to herself.Pub Date: April 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50195-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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