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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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