A memoir of broken relationships, family recipes and hard-earned love that reads at times like a menu of personal grievances...
One woman cooks and cries her way through seasons of disenchantment and discovery.
Fraught with family drama and dinner tables, New Mexico Magazine managing editor Walsh's (co-editor: Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women, 2010, etc.) story begins before conception and leaves few moments of her life thereafter unturned. “This story,” she writes, “is not only the story of my lifelong love affair with food, but a story of identity: how I found out what (and who) I was truly made of historically; what my own truth was, one meal at a time.” Walsh opens with a brief climb up the family tree, focusing especially on her family's matriarchs and their bruised relationships with men, prefiguring the author’s own story. We see Walsh as a child, forced by her father to clear her plate of her own vomit; as a high school graduate, nearly choked to death by her stepfather; as a young adult, experimenting with drugs and alcohol and dating losers. The book’s brightest points serve as testaments to personal reinvention and healing. The rapid hot-and-cold changes in her undeniably tumultuous life will keep pages turning, and Walsh wins points for resisting the frostinglike sweetness of many contemporary food memoirs, but the thick, bitter glaze of self-pity will not suit everyone's tastes. Passionate depictions of food and cooking, seemingly offered as a main course, fail to tempt, although several of the book's small moments of levity are catalyzed by culinary matters. When Walsh writes with pride and joy of the day she brought her shiny, new KitchenAid home and recalls tenderly the comfort found in a simple chicken fricassee, those moments shimmer like oil in a hot pan.
A memoir of broken relationships, family recipes and hard-earned love that reads at times like a menu of personal grievances and their suggested food pairings.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58005-391-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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