A culinary adventure that’s enhanced by familial and regional histories.
Bumpus (Recipes for Redemption, 2015, etc.) offers a travelogue packed with history and recipes.
In 2002, the author, a retired American family therapist, set out to discover what has held “European families together.” She found that by “focusing on a family’s favorite foods” in interviews, she could capture not only recipes, but key details of family history. This inspired this first book in a series on French and Italian family traditions and accompanying cuisines. Initially traveling with her husband, Winston, and Josiane Selvage, their French friend who served as their translator, Bumpus first went to Reims to visit their first local hosts, Martine and Jean-Claude Zabeé. In the text, she tours the ancient city and discusses the couple’s favorite foods, offers cooking lessons, and reveals local historical detail. A recipe for spinach tortellini, for example, came from Jean-Claude’s mother, who got it from a neighbor from Italy. The coal mines of the area, Bumpus notes, attracted workers from Italy, Poland, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Germany, transforming the area into a multicultural melting pot. Bumpus takes readers on an engaging tour of France’s northeastern regions, including Champagne, Alsace, and Lorraine, and she highlights the local festivities, customs, and food in each. Over the course of this book, Bumpus’ writing is perspicuous and economical, particularly when she shares conversations with her hosts: “They erupted into loud guffaws again as the invisible memories came crashing into our conversation.” The author’s discussions with locals, which make up a sizable portion of the book, are descriptive and successfully place readers in the midst of the conversations, as in this offhand description as Selvage’s friend Christine Lochert discusses doing laundry with her mother: “ ‘Yes, at a lavoir.’ Christine turned from the stove, rinsed her hands at the sink, and grabbed a hand towel before she continued.” The recipes, too, are enticing and detailed, and the book as a whole should appeal to Francophiles and ambitious cooks.
A culinary adventure that’s enhanced by familial and regional histories.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-549-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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