“I knead for my needs,” the author insists—and readers are likely to join her.
An atypical memoir about how one woman learned spiritual lessons through baking bread.
Nearly every Friday for the past decade, debut author Ricanati, a Los Angeles–area doctor specializing in women’s health, has baked challah bread. When she started, she was stressed and overworked, and she discovered that this baking process both rooted her in her Jewish faith and encouraged her to slow down and focus on the depth of her experience: “I could reconnect with myself and with other women,” she writes. “I could find some happiness in this mixed-up, fast-paced world. I could, in other words, be present.” In a sort of whistle-stop tour through her past, she convincingly argues that, for her, “Food is medicine.” Whether she was writing a cookbook for the blind, creating a guide to eating disorders for a local hospital, or taking a cooking class during a lonely summer in Paris, she says that she was always acting on her belief that healthy comfort food was a way to care for herself and others. What’s more, challah “is the ultimate soul food for me,” she writes, as it forms an essential part of the Sabbath ritual. The 11 steps of making challah, as she lays them out here, effectively function as a metaphorical course in professional and spiritual discipline. Ricanati draws intriguing symbolic connections between the bread-baking process, her faith in God, and her busy life as a physician. In both baking and medicine, she notes, “mise en place” (putting everything in its place) is essential, as being organized defuses anxiety. The magical moment when the yeast comes to life, she says, brings to mind the first birth she observed. Waiting for the dough to rise, she writes, teaches her that God is in control; judging how much flour to add encourages flexibility; knowing when the bread is done requires patience. The book is impressively thorough, giving advice on every baking element from oil (canola) to flour (King Arthur brand, all-purpose), and she offers informative sidebars on sugar and the gluten-free craze.
“I knead for my needs,” the author insists—and readers are likely to join her.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-441-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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