A rugged tale of a self-made woman in a high-stress profession.
A celebrated Boston-area chef rehearses her rugged Southie background, her rise into the ranks of the elite restaurateurs, and her various personal doings and demons.
Lynch, who has won multiple James Beard awards and published an award-winning cookbook, Stir: Mixing it up in the Italian Tradition (2009), now operates seven restaurants in the Boston area. In her debut memoir, she begins with her Southie girlhood, where things could have gone very wrong. Her father died early, “of alcoholism, the Irish scourge,” and she grew up in a neighborhood where she shoplifted, swindled, once dodged bullets with Whitey Bulger, stole a city bus and, later, a cab for joy rides, broke both legs in a careless street stunt, endured a sexual horror better left to her description, and dropped out of high school. It was not an auspicious beginning, but Lynch had a talent with food and a fierce determination and an equally fierce work ethic; soon she was moving upward in the culinary ranks. The author expresses justifiable pride in these accomplishments—a pride that rarely drifts into self-celebration—and writes almost breathlessly about her encounters with Julia Child, about cooking for some celebrities, and about her other heroes and mentors in the profession. Lynch is proud of maintaining her Southie roots; she has never lived very far away. She also writes frankly about her personal life. She married a much older man, had a daughter (whom she didn’t see as much as she would have liked due to work responsibilities), had an epiphany about her sexuality, went into counseling for alcohol abuse, and had a near-death experience in surgery. Whenever she writes about food, her passion is evident, and she appends a number of recipes that will surely send some readers straight to the kitchen.
A rugged tale of a self-made woman in a high-stress profession.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9544-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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