A charming, if not revelatory, portrait of a woman determined to bring French cuisine to a wider audience, with emphasis on...
British founder of the bilingual La Varenne cooking school in Paris, veteran cookbook author and world traveler Willan traces her experiences through piquant anecdotes, including favorite recipes that mark salient memories and friendships.
From her Yorkshire roots to a Cambridge education, training in Paris to marriage, American citizenship, entrance into “worldliness,” the creation of La Varenne, envisioned as an alternative to the famed Cordon Bleu, La Varenne’s closure and her later career teaching at venues such as the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, Willan admits to a life often characterized by luck and privilege. With the assistance of Friedman, she narrates with ease, briefly recalling encounters with elite personages and celebrated chefs such as Julia Child. Without self-aggrandizing, such moments vivify a slice of the gastronomic world, particularly during the 1970s, when women were seldom permitted in professional kitchens, nouvelle cuisine was finding its footing, and the explosion of the Food Network had yet to occur. The handful of less-than-flattering scenes—such as those revealing quirks of students and colleagues—are treated with gentle humor, and the author mentions hardships with graceful aplomb. Willan segues between chronology and recipes in a straightforward manner, resulting in an episodic career memoir interwoven with momentous life occasions, from cross-Atlantic moves to weddings and deaths. Compelling chapters on La Varenne in Paris and its courses at Château du Feÿ in Burgundy reveal the pleasures and complications of working in the kitchen, though readers seeking more in-depth details will find these chapters too few.
A charming, if not revelatory, portrait of a woman determined to bring French cuisine to a wider audience, with emphasis on traditional, accessible recipes that respect the intellectual side of cookery. Recommended for Francophiles and culinary enthusiasts.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-64217-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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