by Amy Thomas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2018
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
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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