If the Michelin guide gave a star to memoirs of a life in food, Sánchez rates at least a pair.
Sánchez (Simple Food, Big Flavor, 2011, etc.) plates a taster's menu of personal and professional influences, not to mention a few culinary travails, in a memoir infused with succulence, revelation, and ethnic pride.
Son of a gustatory pioneer, the author is a seasoned chef, restaurateur, and TV personality (currently seen on MasterChef) whose Latin roots run deep. Born in El Paso, nurtured in New York, and now based in New Orleans, he shot to international fame as a regular on the Food Network. This chronicle of an adventurous life in and out of the kitchen is a love letter not just to expansive pan-Latin cuisine, but to the power of food to bring cultures together and discover the most nourishing qualities of each. The book is also a cautionary tale for the higher reaches of a hospitality industry often distracted by inessentials, risky behavior, and the traps of celebrity. Throughout the well-constructed narrative (which includes recipes), the writing is crisp, candid, and rich with emotion, the latter ingredient applied liberally. The author’s account of the evolution of Food Network is especially flavorsome. But Sánchez reserves much room in the pot for an inward and outward journey of self-exploration as a man of two worlds, Mexican and American. The “life lessons” of the subtitle are not original—whose are?—but they are certainly valid for those in the food industry struggling to balance family and sanity with workload and opportunity, and they are no less instructive for aspiring chefs or those dealing with chronic depression and anxiety. With a soupçon of sympathy, Sánchez can even make the painful palatable. Occasionally, the narrative is somewhat repetitive, and, though trivial, a too-liberal use of the F-word might be off-putting for some readers. Nonetheless, the author offers readers a delicious reading experience.
If the Michelin guide gave a star to memoirs of a life in food, Sánchez rates at least a pair.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3802-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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