A wild ride for foodies and those captivated by sagas of recovery.
A chef as well known for his turbulent life as his dishes chronicles his quick rise, spectacular fall and reinvention.
Success in the competitive world of professional cooking generally comes after years of grueling work, discipline and determination. Not so for 28-year-old Baltzley. By 9, he was working alongside his single mother in her cafe in the back of a gay bar in Jacksonville, Fla. “Most people aren’t lucky enough to know before they’re nine years old what they want to do with their lives," he writes. "But for me, it was never really a question—my fate was sealed in the back of the Whistlestop Café, chopping corn at my mother’s counter.” Baltzley left high school to concentrate on improving his cooking skills and playing music with a heavy metal band. In Savannah, he scored a job with Paula Deen at The Lady & Sons. After that, he roamed through restaurants from Maine to Pittsburgh, continuing his experimentation with food, cooking techniques and menus. Meanwhile, his escalating drug use ruined relationships with employers, co-workers and girlfriends (he fathered a child with one of them). His talents continued to land him gigs in prestigious restaurants, but his substance abuse finally culminated in a revolving-door year in and out of four top Chicago restaurants, including Alinea. At the pinnacle of his tumultuous career, named executive chef at Simon Lamb's trendy Tribute, the author entered rehab. “Normalcy was something I never thought I could obtain, but I realized that that’s what I wanted, even more than sobriety,” he writes. Now married and sober, with his first solo restaurant, TMIP, in the works in rural Indiana, he seems poised for a new life. His unrelentingly candid memoir delivers in-your-face details about his missteps, larded with juicy peeks into the restaurant world, cutting-edge culinary practices and supersized personalities.
A wild ride for foodies and those captivated by sagas of recovery.Pub Date: May 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59240-791-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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