A wildly partisan paean to Adrià and a celebration of culinary wonders.
Saveur co-founder and former Gourmet magazine columnist Andrews (The Country Cooking of Ireland, 2009, etc.) chronicles and applauds the career of Ferran Adrià, a chef whose El Bulli restaurant became a lighthouse of innovation and experimentation.
The author doesn’t conceal his admiration and awe of his subject. He continually refers to Adrià as a genius and the most influential chef in the world—perhaps in history. Andrews received Adrià’s permission to write his story—though Adrià publishes his own books and produces numerous videos about his culinary philosophy and practices—and spent two years with enviable access to the chef and to his remote restaurant near the town of Rosas in the Catalonia region of Spain. The author also interviewed many of Adrià’s friends, colleagues and rivals. Early in the text, Andrews describes a 40-course meal he ate in El Bulli—it takes nearly eight pages to mention them all—a meal that will be among the last the restaurant will serve in its present incarnation. Andrews then relates the history of the restaurant, telling how Adrià began his career as a dishwasher but studied classic recipes and techniques. While in the army, he began cooking for an admiral, hooked up with future celebrity chef (and now friend) Fermí Puig and went to work for El Bulli with Puig in the late 1980s. The author emphasizes Adrià’s ferocious work ethic, his eagerness to share what he has learned and his explorations of the arts and sciences. Andrews tells how Adrià eventually became an owner of El Bulli and how he expanded the business into research, catering and other enterprises. Throughout, Andrews staunchly defends his subject against all detractors.
A wildly partisan paean to Adrià and a celebration of culinary wonders.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-592-40572-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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