An attractive mise en place, but one that lacks the simple artistry of that long-remembered potato.
A writer enters the Culinary Institute of America, the Ivy League of cooking schools.
Ruhlman (Boys Themselves, 1996) began a love affair with food after an uncle passionately detailed in a letter a potato he'd been served years before at a New Orleans restaurant. Ruhlman entered the CIA with that perfect potato in mind. The CIA, as exacting as the agency with which it shares its abbreviated name, requires students to arrive with a set of freshly sharpened knives and to be familiar with videos such as "Shucking Oysters'' and "Calf Slaughter.'' Ruhlman enters the school with some trepidation, particularly as the first day's soup stock is made with 120 pounds of chicken bones. The actual work of cooking is demanding—students get burned, they must begin work at dawn to prepare for lunch, and they are expected to learn thousands of recipes—but few drop out. Cooking represents a measure of both science and excess—one teacher regales them with a mythical meal of ancient Rome: a cow stuffed with a pig stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a truffle wrapped in foie gras; only the truffle was eaten. Students are expected to work in restaurants during the school year, and Ruhlman effectively captures their excitement and exhaustion as they learn about the real world of cooking. But Ruhlman is not as fine with the details as a cook needs to be. He calls a Reuben a grilled cheese sandwich, and his response to a teacher's impassioned lecture on Alice Waters's ethic at Chez Panisse—which he sums up as "if we screw up the earth, we'll have rotten food''—is needlessly glib. While his insights into his teachers and students are often interesting, the book has little to say about the art of cooking and even less to say about how it all tastes.
An attractive mise en place, but one that lacks the simple artistry of that long-remembered potato.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4674-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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