by Amy Ettinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 27, 2017
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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