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 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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