A yummy treat even for fans of Sanka and Michelob.
Recipes, restaurant critiques, and food lore—all agreeably season New York Times food writer Hesser’s beguiling story of her two loves: food and the initially unpromising Mr. Latte.
The author’s early reservations about this handsome guy can best be appreciated by urban sophisticates, who will share Hesser’s chagrin as she finds herself keeping company with a man who ends his meal with a latte and sweetens it with Equal. (Espresso sweetened naturally with cane sugar would be culinarily correct.) Their first date is arranged by a mutual friend, and Hesser is not impressed by the venue, a noisy restaurant that serves beer in bottles. She is rather attracted to Mr. Latte, also known as New Yorker writer Tad Friend, even if he does order a Budweiser; he will simply have to be reformed, she decides, if the relationship is to continue. Their courtship and his culinary education go hand in hand as Hesser charts food experiences ranging from restaurants to dinners with respective friends and families. Each chapter, about food as much as romance, includes recipes. These too play to an urban sensibility, as well as the urban ease in acquiring ingredients not always available in the average supermarket (fennel fronds, sheep’s milk yogurt, salt cod, etc.), but Hesser also tells readers how to make such down-home items as fried-bologna sandwiches, rhubarb pie, and fried chicken. The romance proceeds at a stately pace as the author describes visits on assignment or accompanying family to places like Spain, Italy, and North Dakota (where she hopes to learn how honey is made). Soon Mr. Latte shows signs of improvement—his mother is, after all, an excellent cook—as he talks about food and critiques new restaurants. But though he proposes, he also has some changes in mind, and there are a few bumpy moments ahead before his education and hers are complete.
A yummy treat even for fans of Sanka and Michelob.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05196-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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