A tasty stew of gripping stories and evocative foodie lore.
A woman looks back on a peripatetic life via recollections of memorable dishes in this rollicking memoir and cookbook.
Novelist and food writer Bertelsen recounts her youth growing up in Washington state and Florida and many periods spent abroad while working with the U.S. Peace Corps and accompanying her husband, an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, to foreign postings. Her travels took her from Milwaukee to Morocco to Machu Picchu and included some tense and even terrifying moments, from a bout of altitude sickness in Bolivia that had her vomiting until a cup of coca tea settled her stomach to a menacing encounter with a band of Sandinista rebels in Honduras and a riot in Port-au-Prince after the overthrow of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. These episodes are entwined with reminiscences about iconic meals—each chapter concludes with a recipe—and these culinary experiences resonate with the greater narrative. The warmth of her childhood home is conveyed by recollections of her father’s vegetable beef soup, while the grinding poverty of Burkina Faso is brought to life by her relationship with a sick woman who sold her produce that grew more withered as the dry season progressed. Bertelsen’s novelistic prose features dynamic scenes and vivid detail: “Mr. Tartar Sauce grabbed Lee and kissed her right on her big red lipsticked mouth,” she writes of an assault by a drunken man on a cook in a Florida seafood restaurant where she worked. Her food writing is also rich and sensuous—“the crunchiness of the flautas, paired with the creaminess of the guacamole and the crema, seasoned with a squirt of fresh lime, fired with the hot bite of green salsa”—and sometimes nearly carnal: “I ate like a wolf with a fresh kill, gulping the food on my plate in gasping, almost orgiastic bites, wadding up balls of bread and stuffing them into my mouth.” The end result is a truly mouthwatering read.
A tasty stew of gripping stories and evocative foodie lore.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1734557923
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Turquoise Moon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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