Warmly written, balanced but unsparing in its portraits, and culminating in a touching coda, Barr’s persuasive book...
In his debut, Travel & Leisure editor Barr revisits a pivotal moment in culinary history with a brio and attention to detail that rivals that of his subjects.
In 1970, when ardent Francophiles Julia and Paul Child, Richard Olney, M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard convened in Provence, a pantheon of American food writers inspired by all things French were to experience not only a transition in their perceptions of Gallic primacy, but the first stirrings of a revolution in American gastronomy—a revolution they helped bring into being, fired almost as much by contentiousness as amity. Barr, Fisher’s great-nephew, reveals how these encounters within a rather insular coterie happened more or less by accident but at an incendiary time, when American attitudes toward its own culture were alight with change. The author also demonstrates how these writers, challenging themselves to temper nostalgia and embrace new ideas, opened a door to a seductive philosophy of simple pleasures that led directly to today’s pervasive “foodie” ethic: cooking as a practical but rewarding art form. Their respective cookbooks and Child’s immensely popular TV show encouraged Americans to celebrate their gustatory diversity, gravitate to fresh and organic ingredients, learn more sophisticated but accessible techniques, and enjoy a growing sense of liberation from old ways—even autocratic French ones. Barr chronicles this demystification process by focusing on how this group of strong personalities reacted to a fortuitous point in time. He does so in such an immediate, inviting way that one feels a member of the party, privy to the conversations, the meals, the generous gestures and corrosive rivalries. The author’s most invaluable resource was a 1970 journal kept by Fisher, who emerges as the linchpin of the book.
Warmly written, balanced but unsparing in its portraits, and culminating in a touching coda, Barr’s persuasive book overcomes the occasional longueur to offer an enhanced appreciation of some groundbreaking cooks and their acolytes.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-71834-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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