A wide-ranging, toothsome smorgasbord of Gotham's good eats and the tireless men and women behind each plate.
Exuberant New York chefs and restaurateurs share their culinary histories.
Initially inspired by a conversation with an Upper West Side butcher, Yalof (Straight From The Heart: Letters of Hope and Inspiration from Survivors of Breast Cancer, 1997, etc.) began researching the “gastronomic landscape of New York City” throughout its five distinct boroughs. Eschewing the popular go-to dining destinations with their in-house “rock-star chefs,” the author canvassed chefs and shop owners of some newer and less-well-known establishments representative of the region’s diversity. Each interviewee generously shares his or her diverse background and offers unique and educative perspectives on taste, ingredients, and service experiences. An opening section on food-centered grass-roots businesses celebrates immigrant purveyors from Croatia, France, Greece, and Poland who all share a passion for hard work and flavorful delicacies both sweet and savory from their native lands. Personality and humor shine brightly throughout these essays, especially in the stories of Charlie Sahadi’s years curating a Middle Eastern deli, “entertainologist” Lulu Powers’ first catering blunders, and young cook MacKenzie Arrington’s insightful restaurant coming-of-age. Others highlight the business end of the food industry—e.g., Louisiana-born praline perfectionist Lauren Clark, who ponders the necessary transitions small ventures must make to stay profitable or food truck vendors like The Halal Guys, who prize cleanliness, word-of-mouth advertising, and the principle of the happy customer. From the oldest Chinese restaurant in New York to a Rikers Island food service overseer, each of these vignettes shares a common theme about devotion and dedication within the vast gastronomical spectrum. This is most eloquently dispatched by South Harlem baker “Mr. Lee,” who knows that “you got to be a 100 percent to do this.” Collectively, Yalof’s assortment of cuisines and memories paints a multiculturally diverse food tapestry, and each individually embodies a passion for food artistry that crosses generations, cultures, nationalities, and all manner of palates.
A wide-ranging, toothsome smorgasbord of Gotham's good eats and the tireless men and women behind each plate.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16892-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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