Engrossing details of being the front man in a variety of thriving restaurants.
A frank and funny memoir of a successful New York restaurateur.
Distinctly Italian with a twist of Queens, Bastianich displays a palpable love of good Italian food and wine throughout his humorous reflections on how he became one of the best-known restaurant owners in New York City. From his early days as a dishwasher and busboy in his parents’ Italian restaurant (his mother is famed chef Lidia Bastianich), the author learned the basics of restaurant management—e.g., “your margins are three times your cost on everything”; “you have to appear to be generous, but you have to be inherently a cheap fuck to make it work”; “no bottle of wine costs more than five dollars to make.” After a stint in Wall Street and a wild time in Italy working in restaurants and vineyards, Bastianich returned to New York, unable to deny his “biological imperative.” Using the maxims his father had taught him, he launched his own restaurant, Becco, and from there the direction was only up. He and his business partner, Mario Batali, moved on to open many other prosperous Italian eateries, culminating in his part ownership of Del Posto, the only four-star Italian restaurant in America. Despite his liberal use of the f-bomb, the author’s easygoing voice and substantial knowledge of real Italian food (not the spaghetti-and-meatballs kind) will lure booklovers and food lovers alike. Oenophiles will appreciate Bastianich’s rich descriptions of the many Italian wines he recommends and his savant-like ability to recall and identify the tens of thousands of wines he has tasted since his childhood.
Engrossing details of being the front man in a variety of thriving restaurants.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02352-3
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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