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 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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