Delectable: Bon appetit!
Rossant (Return to Paris, 2003, etc.) concludes her trilogy of memoirs with this mouthwatering reminiscence of marriage and her stellar epicurean career.
In 1955, the author and her husband left France for New York. For Rossant, moving to America meant, foremost, the discovery of new food, starting with an ice-cream sundae. She’d read about this “mountain of ice cream” in French reporters’ accounts of America, but had never tasted one. Baked potatoes and bagels quickly became favorites as well. She missed lunching on a baguette stuffed with ham, but made do with cream cheese on walnut bread from Chock Full ’o Nuts. Broccoli took some getting used to: “It looked like a small tree, and tasted somewhat like cabbage . . . too bland.” Indeed, American vegetables were generally a problem. String beans seemed a wholly different species than the haricots verts Rossant had enjoyed in France. Iceberg lettuce was . . . well, barely lettuce. She also found American packaged food tricky; making her first attempt with a cake mix, she baked the icing and used the cake powder as glaze. While navigating American cuisine, Rossant had children and a series of jobs, including writing for a French-language newspaper and teaching French at Hofstra Univ., where she met Alice Trillin. After Trillin’s husband Calvin praised Rossant’s cooking in his book Alice, Let’s Eat, she was invited to write for Vogue and other magazines. Around the same time, she presided over a cooking club formed by her daughter Juliette, then in fifth grade. The club quickly grew into a series of children’s cooking classes, the classes spawned a TV show, and the TV show led to a book contract for a children’s cookbook. Rossant’s breathless yet humble descriptions of her cooking and her vocational success are great fun to read. Scrumptious-sounding recipes (goose neck pâté, poached pears with caramel, apple mousse) conclude each chapter.
Delectable: Bon appetit!Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2006
ISBN: 0-7434-9028-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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