Over-the-top and highly diverting international culinary adventures, always to be taken with a generous grain of salt—and make it Fleur de Sel—and best consumed a bite at a time.
Forget the “perfect meal” baloney. What chef Bourdain (the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, not reviewed, etc.) is looking for on his yearlong earth-spanning journey is a good mix of food, memory, and context, and if it comes with a modest side of danger and another of humor, more the better. Bourdain enjoys being outrageous—“blowing chunks” is how he vomits, and his “pig-fisting” is more aptly known as cleaning the intestine of a pig—and he over-relishes the mock macho (“Casinos? Run by the most vicious, hard-core Commie mass murderers in history? Well, why not check it out?”). But his enthusiasm is mighty engaging, and his snappy, full-bore writing style—whether being sarcastic, passionate, or descriptive—is good entertainment. And exhausting. Food, oh boy, does he know his food; only when speaking of food (and the rare landscape that gets right into his soul) does Bourdain get serious. In these tales, Bourdain lives close to the ground, getting the local experience, enjoying the alchemy of food in which necessity is the mother of cooking magic. With TV crew in tow—a series is in the works—Bourdain attends the butchering (literal and figurative) of a pig in Portugal and bacaloa-making in the Basque country, and partakes in vodka and black bread in Russia, a tagine of kefta in Morocco, and some truly nasty encounters in Mexico and Cambodia. (Truly nasty encounters, indeed, most everywhere.) And he seems never happier than when sticking it to the self-righteous, be they San Francisco vegans or folks decrying the making of foie gras (the birds, Bourdain notes, are fed “a considerably lesser amount comparative to body weight than, say, a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast”).
Ultimately, then, it’s not about the food, it’s about the chef and author: a high-maintenance gent, brash, insightful, a jokester, and certainly someone you wouldn't want by your side at a touchy border crossing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-140-0
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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