Even though some of Kimball’s final clichéd observations and puffy epiphanies collapse like an ill-prepared pastry, he...
The founder of Cook’s Illustrated and host of America’s Test Kitchen hosts an elaborate meal—a tasty time machine transporting readers back to the kitchens and dining rooms of Victorian America.
Kimball’s journey comprises numerous detours. We learn about the purchase and conversion of his Boston home, the discovery and renovation of an 1890s coal/wood stove, the training and practice of his support staff and the seemingly endless testing of and tinkering with recipes. (Cost seems not to have been much of a factor.) The author ends each chapter with the final version of the recipe he used. Kimball instructs us about the history of American cookery, utensils, food products and the choreography of the Victorian kitchen staff. He underscores the enormous effort it took to acquire food, prepare it and clean up afterwards, and he emphasizes the paradox of the class system in a democracy. The author also perused countless cookbooks from the era, read newspaper articles and recipes and studied old maps of Boston—all eventually influenced his decisions about the preparation of his mega-meal. Kimball tells the story of Fannie Farmer, whose kitchen was near his home, but he doesn’t think much of the aesthetic or gustatory pleasures of many of Farmer’s recipes (he uses terms like “inedible” and “particularly vile” to describe some of them). He recognizes, though, that she took a big step in the evolution of contemporary cooking. The day of the meal finally arrived—an event that PBS filmed and will air in November 2010—and amid the hustle, bustle and incredible cookstove heat, people ate a lot and sang old Broadway hits afterward.
Even though some of Kimball’s final clichéd observations and puffy epiphanies collapse like an ill-prepared pastry, he provides an appealing confection of cultural history, memoir and culinary instruction.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2322-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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