Best consumed in small portions, Ettinger’s book will be a vicarious treat for fellow addicts.
Essayist Ettinger’s affection for ice cream takes her across the country in a search for variations on her favorite food.
The author, who attributes her interest to the “immense tubs of generic-brand ice cream” her father dragged home in compensation for other lacks in the family, now describes herself as an “ice cream snob.” She has taught herself to make ice cream and includes relatively esoteric recipes at the end of many of the chapters, though readers interested in duplicating her efforts might be wise to first read her chapter about the difficulty of manufacturing her chosen delight. Ettinger enrolled in the short version of “the world’s most famous ice cream making class” at Penn State University, where she faced the dilemma of whether to spit out samples or not and learned more than she wanted to know about listeria. More than anything, the Santa Cruz–based author traveled, sampling frozen custard in Milwaukee and getting carjacked in the process; riding along in a Brooklyn ice cream truck and learning about the vicious territory disputes for such trucks in New York; and even, to her own disgust, investigating her nemesis, frozen yogurt, which tries “so unsuccessfully to imitate the whipped fatty creaminess of my childhood obsession.” Along the way, she makes the questionable case that “ice cream is more like a drug than any other food,” and she works up a certain amount of indignation about how many ice cream makers, even allegedly artisan operations, use commercial ice cream base rather than manufacturing their own. But for the most part, she keeps her tone light, concentrating on the pleasures of Brown Butter Spiced Pumpkin Seed gelato, “like a studly hazelnut gigolo.”
Best consumed in small portions, Ettinger’s book will be a vicarious treat for fellow addicts.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98419-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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