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OUT OF LINE

Name: OUT OF LINE
Author: Barbara Lynch
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9544-7

A LIFE OF PLAYING WITH FIRE

by Barbara Lynch ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017

A rugged tale of a self-made woman in a high-stress profession.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)