Edge-of-your-seat food writing of the highest caliber.
A vibrant portrait of the world’s most significant cooking competition, the Bocuse d’Or, in Lyon, France.
Food and tennis writer Friedman (co-author, with Pino Luongo: Dirty Dishes: A Restaurateur’s Story of Passion, Pain, and Pasta, 2008, etc.) dynamically illustrates the colorful personalities, ego-battering conflicts, career-defining aspirations, politicking, precision planning, naked missteps and the final judges’ decisions regarding the 2009 U.S. team’s shot for the culinary gold medal. “Competition doesn’t form character…Competition reveals character,” says Roland Henin, the U.S. coach, and the characters exposed beneath the stress of the 2009 competition are, in Friedman’s hands, considerable. Henin chose a triumvirate of legendary chefs as his leadership—Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud and Jerome Bocuse, son of Paul Bocuse, founder of the Bocuse d’Or—and trained his team in a stage kitchen mock-up in California. The author follows Keller, Boulud and Bocuse as they assemble and obsessively train the strongest team of American chefs the 22-year-old competition has seen. Timothy Hollingsworth and Adina Guest, both veterans of Keller’s restaurant The French Laundry, prepared painstakingly for what Hollingsworth would later describe as “the hardest thing he’s ever done.” Friedman expertly builds the dramatic tension to the surprising conclusion. Like the raucous Bocuse d’Or itself, the writing is simultaneously athletic and infused with a gastronome’s passion. Snappy, well-timed dialogue keeps the narrative simmering briskly. Precisely rendered portrayals of ingredients, dishes, kitchen jargon, exotic foreign locales and the politics of international cuisine are aptly balanced with plenty of insider detail and mainstream accessibility. The book is infused with the muscular, meticulous gusto of a sportswriter covering the Olympics.
Edge-of-your-seat food writing of the highest caliber.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5307-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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