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 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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