A highly detailed traditional biography of an unconventional woman.
A journalist examines the life of an important but neglected British-born cookbook author.
Federman tells the story of Patience Gray (1917-2005), who became a world expert on the cuisine of the Salento region of southern Italy. Gray was born into an upper-middle-class family that she later remembered for its Edwardian rigidity and hypocrisy. While a student at the London School of Economics, she began frequenting leftist and artistic circles. She had two children out of wedlock, lived in a small cottage with no electricity or running water, and scratched out a living as a freelance designer and editor. It was during this period that Gray developed an interest in foraging, which she did to supplement a restricted wartime diet. Her first cookbook, Plats du Jour, appeared in 1957. With its emphasis on simple cooking that took its cue from Continental—especially French, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian—cuisine, it became a “standard reference” for “the average home cook.” At the same time, Gray began questioning the new British love affair with consumerism. Along with her partner, Belgian sculpture Norman Mommens, she traveled across Europe in search of a place where she could lead a simpler, more authentic life. The journey took them first to the Greek island of Naxos and then to the extreme south of Italy, where they settled in an old farmhouse called Spigolizzi. Embracing a radically simple lifestyle, they lived off the land, ate according to the seasons, and created art. Federman’s book is meticulously researched, but the amount of detail may prove dry for general readers. Still, the author’s portrait of the complex, fiercely independent woman who reshaped ideas about cooking and food and about what constitutes a life well-lived in a world defined by the “numbing effects” of modernity is intriguing and well-rendered.
A highly detailed traditional biography of an unconventional woman.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60358-608-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chelsea Green
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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