A warm, mildly immersive memoir documenting how Thielen found her calling by embracing her down-home influences.
A Saveur contributing editor and James Beard Award–winning cookbook author reflects on her Midwestern upbringing as inspiration for her culinary pursuits.
The frenzied, behind-the-scenes activity within New York’s leading restaurant kitchens has been well-documented in numerous cooking memoirs of recent years. Massive egos running rampant, razor-sharp precision and timing demanded at every moment, 80-hour work weeks—Thielen (The New Midwestern Table: 200 Heartland Recipes, 2013), who hosts a Food Network show, delivers plenty of these now-familiar revelations in her debut memoir. The author’s journey begins in the late 1990s, when, freshly arrived from Minnesota with her boyfriend (and future husband), Aaron, she landed a job as a line chef at David Bouley’s famed Danube. She later rose to more prominent positions under such notables as Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud. For several years, the author and Aaron shuttled back and forth between New York and their home in a deeply rural section of Minnesota, where they live largely off the land. As Thielen contemplated how her future in the industry would unfold, her objectives stretched beyond the predictable aspirations of opening a restaurant or even continuing in New York. She reflects on the values of family and community bonds and recalls how her culinary instincts were instilled by her mother’s less pretentious skills as a home cook: “Her caramels, her bacon-fried rice, and her Cesar salad (trademarked with a burning amount of garlic) made her a minor star in our neighborhood circle, and in our lives.” Thielen’s narrative journey evolves somewhat passively, and she offers few fresh insights into the food industry or the high-end restaurant scene, yet her musings on ingredients and flavors are engaging: “The joy of lemon cannot stand alone; it needs sugar or olive oil, something to bring it back to earth. Vinegar literally cries out for fat. Fat falls flat without salt or sugar. Chile heat sings with brown sugar. And bitterness, well, that needs it all.”
A warm, mildly immersive memoir documenting how Thielen found her calling by embracing her down-home influences.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-95490-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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