Like a great dinner party, Erway’s memoir is full of fabulous food and engaging conversation.
A New York City food blogger chronicles her time as a culinary shut-in.
Erway had her epiphany while eating a greasy hamburger. Like many New Yorkers, she rarely cooked at home, instead indulging in the countless restaurants her adopted hometown offered. However, while New York is arguably the epicurean capital of the world, many of the eateries serve little more than expensive greasy hamburgers. Erway decided that both her stomach—and her wallet—needed a break. Her solution was to go on a complete restaurant fast and document the process—the discoveries, the recipes and the restrictions—on her blog, noteatingoutinny.com. During the course of her two-year experiment, she cooked her way through three apartments, one relationship and an attempt at dating. She also spawned several award-winning dishes, immersed herself in New York’s foodie underground and managed to cook tripe. Most remarkable, however, is not the fact that she made it that long without eating out—she often took premade food with her in case of emergencies. Rather, it’s how appealing and simple the author makes it seem. She makes whipping up a batch of homemade basil ice cream seem as easy as microwave pizza. She turns foraging in New York parks into an adventure. And she makes every success, including her prize-winning no-knead bread recipe, into readers’ victory as well, including recipes for her favorite dishes at the end of each chapter. All of this is presented in a light, girl-next-door manner; the author gleefully mixes and sautés through life, making you want to grab a spoon and help.
Like a great dinner party, Erway’s memoir is full of fabulous food and engaging conversation.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-592-40525-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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