French cuisine once was unassailable, the West's finest, but while its influence has diminished even in France—as have many...
The Art of Eating magazine founder Behr (50 Foods, 2013, etc.) serves as an admirable traveling companion through the world of French cuisine, offering high sailing on gustatory seas as well as grounding in history and broader cultural concerns.
“France is the greatest country for bread, cheese and wine,” writes the author, “and its culinary techniques are the foundation of the training of nearly every serious Western cook and some beyond.” However, determining what is definably French is more elusive, given its diversity, global influences, and the fact that there are really two Frances: Paris and the rest of the country. In reintroducing us to French food, Behr's attempts to secure this definition are mixed but generally engaging. He is most successful in his evocation of the spirit of French cuisine, its origins, and numerous ironies, though his chapters could have utilized a more logical progression and less (save for connoisseurs) technical exposition. Still, from classical and nouvelle cuisine to an unparalleled world of wine and fromage, Behr goes behind the scenes to reveal the hows and whys of French food in all its manifestations, each allied to a desire for balance, harmony, and sensual pleasure. The story of French food “is disproportionally the story of food in Paris,” the author writes, but he takes us on a detailed gastronomic tour of the entire country, including those regions whose tastes don't seem terribly “French” to outsiders. He also affords readers an informed survey of the finest writers on French food, including the 20th-century critic and author Curnonsky (aka Maurice Edmond Sailland) and the American expatriate writer Richard Olney, while celebrating the minuet danced by server and served in a good French restaurant.
French cuisine once was unassailable, the West's finest, but while its influence has diminished even in France—as have many of the dishes that established its reputation—French food still commands a certain fascination, and Behr explores it with appetizing ardor.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-452-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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