Poignant, heartwarming and generously filled with delicious recipes.
An award-winning blogger and MFK Fisher scholar's account of how food not only came to define a difficult childhood, but also became the way she was able to heal her past.
Martin spent her early years living in poverty with her brother, Michael, and a mother who could transform browning bananas, Jell-O and even moldy bread into pure magic. But her mother’s unconventional ways—which included keeping Martin and Michael out of kindergarten—brought her to the attention of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. Soon, Martin and her brother found themselves shunted between foster homes. Their mother fought for their return; but eventually, she sent her children to live with two friends, Patricia and Pierre, who could give them the opportunities she could not. Pierre kept the family living comfortably though peripatetically, while Patricia never let Martin cook because the kitchen "was no place for a child.” Generosity, however, was not enough. Michael committed suicide just before the family moved to Paris, while the author sought solace in alcohol and edgy friends. At the same time, she also began to develop a passion for the one thing that had connected her to her mother: food. That love eventually inspired her to attend cooking school and follow a path that led her away from the chaos of the East Coast to the “honest, sunburned land” of Oklahoma. There, she found unexpected happiness as a stay-at-home wife and mother and began a blog in which she recorded her experiences “eat[ing] around the world.” Dealing with food inevitably led her to recall the past, and she was forced to confront the pain of old relationships with her mother, her brother and half siblings, and the father she never knew. In the end, Martin learned that her journey had been about getting her fill, “[n]ot just of food but of the intangible things we all need: acceptance, love and understanding.”
Poignant, heartwarming and generously filled with delicious recipes.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1426213748
Page Count: 336
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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