A bighearted, multisensory tour of France.
An American diplomat’s wife finds sweet solace in Parisian culture and cuisine.
It had been Mah’s (Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself, 2010) childhood dream to live in Paris, so when her husband accepted an extended assignment to France, she was ecstatic. The typically nomadic lifestyle of a foreign serviceman can be tough on a spouse, however, and when the author found herself alone in the City of Light after her husband was reassigned to Iraq, she was flummoxed. Despite her trepidation, Mah—whose predicament frequently mirrors that of diplomat-wife–cum-chef Julia Child—exuberantly writes of wandering around Paris “conscious of my American accent and Asian face” yet bravely immersing herself in its regional cuisine, which alleviated her loneliness and satiated a blooming curiosity about the luscious food of France. Mah savored the cuisine of 10 different French regions, beginning by sinking her teeth into clumsily ordered but impeccably prepared steak frites, then tackling headier fare like Andouillette. Threaded throughout are anecdotes on Mah’s Chinese-American childhood, her often difficult life as a diplomat’s wife, and the connection between French cultural history and its food. The author lingers over these stories as lovingly as the scrumptious food set before her. Recipes round out each colorful and mouthwateringly described segment as Mah travels to the Brittany region searching out crepes, Provence’s chunky vegetable soupe au pistou, and the Savoie staple, fondue au fromage. Consistently passionate and emotionally resonant, Mah’s prose brims with true love—not only for her adventures in and around the fragrant Parisian marketplaces, but also for daily life sharing delectable food with her husband and rediscovering herself during his lengthy absences.
A bighearted, multisensory tour of France.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02599-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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