For those swept along on the author’s culinary high, she has thoughtfully listed the many restaurants in New York, Brooklyn,...
In her second memoir, creative director and writer Thomas (Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light (and Dark Chocolate), 2012) chronicles her new life in Brooklyn.
Turning 40, falling in love, and becoming a mother are all life-changing events. The author recounts moments of her life as it veered from the freedoms of a single career woman in New York to a first-time mother in Brooklyn. If reading a step-by-step narrative of someone’s wedding sounds appealing, you will love Thomas’ breezy, whimsical style. Throughout the book, the author delights in long descriptions of food, many of which are excessive or unnecessary. For example, Thomas describes a culinary treat whipped up by a graduate of the French Culinary Institute: “After all, this is what she had been doing, eating, and dreaming about her whole life: whipping up crazy concoctions like crack pie, a densely sweet-and-salty pie that sits with an oat cookie crust, and compost cookies, which cram chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, pretzels, potato chips, and coffee grounds into one beautiful, buttery mass of goodness.” The author also runs down the benefits of breast-feeding and provides plenty of details about her burgeoning relationship with her future husband. In addition to the specifics about breast-feeding, new mothers may find Thomas’ list of the contents of her diaper bag to be helpful (she always packs an extra change of clothes in case of “explosive poops”). Unfortunately, too much of the narrative feels like a lightly edited diary, and cringeworthy moments abound—e.g., the book opens with, “in the fall of 2008, fate walked through my office door.”
For those swept along on the author’s culinary high, she has thoughtfully listed the many restaurants in New York, Brooklyn, and Paris mentioned in the text. Many readers, however, will find the overload of information too much.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4591-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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