A fun, easy-to-use kitchen addition.
Burton’s colorful cookbook debut dishes up delectable recipes for beginners and old hands alike.
Inspired by her Polish heritage, her life in Wisconsin, and her world travels, the author offers a lovely collection that includes a little of everything—from somewhat sinful munchies like “Cheese Soup with Chips and Pretzel Dumplings” to healthier fare such as “Apricot Cherry Muesli,” a yogurt topper made with wheat germ. This isn’t a typical mac-and-cheese-for-teens cookbook, as many of the more than 200 recipes in this volume are culinary delights, including, for example, “Lemony Orzo With Hazelnuts.” It begins with two baking sections featuring breads and desserts, and later entries showcase a wide array of hearty food choices, such as gravy, meats, pastas, salads, soups, and seafood. Some user-friendly recipes—including the festive “Candied Mixed Nuts”—can be created in a moderate amount of time, and some more advanced dishes, such as “Layered Vegetable Custard,” are time-consuming and challenging, especially for beginning chefs. Family favorites, such as Burton’s traditional Polish-American “Easter Soup,” take center stage, but other dishes from around the world, such as pad thai, are also included. The easy-to-understand instructions include relatively accessible ingredients that readers can purchase at local grocery stores or farmers markets. The conversational, numbered steps are well-spaced and simple to follow. However, adults may want to supervise younger chefs when frying is involved, and novices may need help zesting oranges or scalding milk. Upbeat color photos and illustrations of teenagers in the kitchen adorn the text, as do color images of several dishes. It’s not entirely clear what makes this specifically a teen cookbook and not an adult one; recipes such as “Zesty Salmon Mousse Tarts,” for example, seem geared for older palates (raw red onions are recommended as a garnish but aren’t required). Nevertheless, parents and teens can cook together, making memories and creative family meals with this lively collection.
A fun, easy-to-use kitchen addition.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4907-6542-6
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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