A great pleasure for foodies, chronicling an unlikely revolution.
It was hard to get a decent meal in America before 1971. Alice Waters helped change all that.
Not single-handedly, of course. But Waters, in France for a semester abroad in 1965, had an awakening: Like Julia Child, whose My Life in France (2000) McNamee (The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone, 1997) nicely bookends, she learned to eat simple food that was fresh and well-chosen. She came home disillusioned with the monstrous cuisine of her native land. “I wanted hot baguettes in the morning, and apricot jam, and café au lait in bowls, and I wanted a café to hang out in the afternoon, and I wanted civilized meals, and I wanted to wear French clothes,” she recalls. She set out for Berkeley, where she absorbed radical ideas and mind-altering substances and opened a restaurant-cum-commune whose inaugural meal, in 1971, was a nice pâté, duck with olives, a plum tart and coffee. It cost $3.95, expensive at the time but nothing like the tariff today. Chez Panisse, named after a French film character, was instantly successful, though Waters, as McNamee clearly shows, wasn’t the most scrupulous businesswoman. She hired people who thought it might be cool to cook or bake or wait tables, and she watched huge amounts of inventory—especially wine—walk out the door. She refused to dress the staff up in tuxedos and such or impose much discipline on a difficult but brilliant bunch, and her stubbornness nearly proved fatal to the restaurant several times. Even when she took on partners with an eye to imposing budgetary reason, she did what she liked: “No matter what the legal papers said, Chez Panisse, from day one, was Alice’s, to be operated, populated, decorated, redecorated, reconceived, fussed over, fiddled with, and loved as Alice saw fit.” Amazingly, as McNamee chronicles, the place survived, and thrived, and Waters—likable on every page, if perhaps a touch scattered—helped change the way Americans ate.
A great pleasure for foodies, chronicling an unlikely revolution.Pub Date: March 26, 2007
ISBN: 1-59420-115-3
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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