An enjoyable, frequently surprising exploration of creativity.
A musician talks to renowned chefs about work, inspiration, and tastes.
Instrumentalist, DJ, and music journalist Thompson, aka Questlove (Mo Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove, 2013), indulges his love of food in this exuberant, eclectic volume of conversations with chefs that reveals as much about the author’s passionate engagement with music as the chefs do about their art. Talking about recipes with Nathan Myhrvold, who runs Modernist Cuisine, “a massive food-related publishing and research project,” the two men agree that instructions, “whether they are sheet music or recipes, don’t always pan out.” Dominique Crenn, of Atelier Crenn, calls cookbooks “quite one-dimensional.” They interest her only when she can “feel the people that are behind them.” Experience and inspiration matter, as does training: Ludo Lefebvre, whose flagship restaurant, Trois Mec, is a modest place in a Los Angeles strip mall, talks about his long apprenticeship before he was ready to come up with his own ideas. Just as the author tells students that the path to becoming a professional musician involves “years of continuous practice,” Lefebvre spent years perfecting his techniques. “Now people say they are chefs at twenty,” he remarks incredulously. Donald Link, of the New Orleans restaurant Cochon, finds his dishes simplifying as he gets older. The elaborate constructions of some young chefs, Link says, seem “too ego-driven. These days, if I cook fish, I want to taste the fish.” “Early on you want to prove yourself,” says Daniel Humm of New York’s Eleven Madison Park. “You want to show five techniques in one dish.” Dave Beran, of the innovative Next in Chicago, which changes its identity every three months, likens creating a menu to putting together an album: “you can think of it as a collection of greatest hits or a series of dishes that tell a story.” Abundant illustrations include a deer being butchered, a theme menu, and elegant raw okra.
An enjoyable, frequently surprising exploration of creativity.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-45942-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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