Two young cooks serve up 100 recipes and real-world culinary tips.
Friends and food: What could be more fun? That's the underlying premise of this practical and creative cookbook, written by two friends in their mid-20s. Eisenpress and Lapine don’t claim to be professional chefs, but not many people are. This cookbook caters to those people, with good ideas for young adults who have small kitchens and limited budgets. Beginning with a list of basic utensils and items that will be needed on the kitchen shelves and in the refrigerator, the book is divided into different sections, including Cooking For One, Potlucking, Brunch and affordable Dinner Party Food. Both vegetarians and carnivores will find variety here. A couple of the easier recipes are run-of-the mill—is there really anyone over the age of 18 who doesn’t know how to make a grilled-cheese sandwich?—but there are plenty of unique, simple recipes, such as Yogurt Carbonara and Green Goddess Soup. Chana Bateta, which the authors claim tastes like an Indian dish, was inspired by leftovers, and their own exotic version of Vietnamese Fisherman’s Stew sounds fantastic. There are also dessert recipes and a chocolate torte that can be made from brownie mix. Easy-to-read recipes for all occasions, whether eating alone, with a date or partying with friends.
Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199824-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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