Never was the kitchen a more welcome port in the storm, or more nurturing, than for the buffeted Rossant, who is a...
In a memoir fully deserving of its moodiness, food writer Rossant (Memoirs of a Lost Egypt, not reviewed) tells of her fitful, melancholy life before she married her husband of 47 years.
Rossant’s mother probably thought of it as freedom, her tendency to drift in and out of her children’s lives, but Rossant experienced it as treachery: all the promises that went begging, being left in the hands of stewards who might or might not have Rossant’s best interests in mind. From a warm childhood among her extended family in Cairo, Rossant was spirited to Paris immediately following WWII, only to wind up in the care of her grandmother, an abrupt and sarcastic woman, after her mother made herself scarce yet again. Having learned in Cairo that the kitchen was a very special place, she was thrilled by her introduction to French food, an omelet aux fines herbs that stole her breath away. And so food steadied her course through the difficulties of her youth, a way in which she could find her footing in uneasy relationships with her family and her boyfriends. Despite the melancholy that pervades the story, there is so much charm in Rossant’s voice—she was baffled when she was 16 that she and her friends were without boyfriends, though “we were actually frumpy, badly dressed, and not a la mode”—that you can smile through the disappointments and drear. And when she finds her focus, it shines: “I discovered that I loved gambling—the rush it gave me. I also liked the olives and slices of saucisson sec they served at the end of the gambling session.” It wasn’t the roulette table that got the last laugh, either. At appropriate moments, Rossant inserts recipes—a friture, a tomato salad, blanquette de veau, raspberry tart—that are little stories in themselves.
Never was the kitchen a more welcome port in the storm, or more nurturing, than for the buffeted Rossant, who is a sympathetic character, and all the more so for her measure of pride. (Photographs)Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-3967-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
