“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 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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