Satisfying, but for dedicated Fisherphiles only.
Exhaustive biography gets behind the myths the acclaimed food writer herself perpetuated about her life, loves, and travels.
Fisher practically invented her own literary genre, argues Reardon (M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters, 1994, etc.), by writing about our hungers, what satisfies them, and how food relates to the larger human experience. More than a dozen books showcased her gifts as a master storyteller, from Serve It Forth (1937), which the Chicago Daily Tribune hailed as “a delicate emulsion” of culinary history and personal anecdotes, to her magnum opus, The Art of Eating, a collection “on the verge of being a novel,” in the opinion of critic Alan Brien. But Fisher’s life was marked by more upheaval than her public persona suggested, and she tended to embellish her past. (The writer enjoyed it, claims daughter Kennedy, when “people thought of her as someone she wasn’t.”) As a teenager in California, she subbed for vacationing reporters at her dad’s newspaper and viewed cooking as a way to get attention from her otherwise self-absorbed family members. (“It made me feel creative and powerful.”) Her first marriage to a Presbyterian minister’s son fell apart, despite her claims to the contrary, thanks to her romance with next-door neighbor Dillwyn Parrish. After Parrish developed Buerger’s disease, lost a leg, and shot himself to death, Fisher embarked on a series of affairs, culminating in the birth of daughter Anna and marriage to New York City socialite Donald Friede, which also ended in divorce. Her chilly relations with her children and subsequent personal problems—she was by turns isolated, needy, and cruel—contrasted with her growing status as an American culinary icon on par with her close friends Julia Child and James Beard. Reardon’s account of Fisher’s life makes for a rewarding but dense read: casual foodies, especially those more interested in her writing accomplishments than her family life, may not find the 544-page slog worth the trouble.
Satisfying, but for dedicated Fisherphiles only.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-86547-562-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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