Something more fascinating than advice and admonitions: the chance to live briefly inside the head of a great chef who keeps...
Stern but realistic advice to those with their hopes pinned on the art of cooking, along with some strangely obvious culinary comments for such an audience.
Boulud’s short, formal-toned work is ostensibly aimed at those who have already logged some substantial hours in the kitchen: “You, on the other hand, having spent three years in cooking school, know a lot more about our craft than I did when I threw myself into this career.” But why, then, does he write, “It all starts with heating the ingredients”? Doesn’t his audience know, when it comes to roasting and sautéing, that this is the case, or that “braising means to cook on a braisier”? Such comments suggest that Boulud, celebrated chef at New York’s four-star Daniel, among others, is reaching for a wider audience, but it also reveals a modest lack of focus, for most home cooks don’t need to know his more arcane details—for instance, that venison “does not have space in its fibers to absorb and hold moisture.” Still, there’s information here that anyone with a glimmer of interest in top-level kitchen life will find intriguing, including even the dedication: “When you are not working, you are thinking about work.” Boulud tells us everything from where the profits come from (dessert and wine) and what the team character of a great kitchen is like (woe to the sous-chef who forgets that “there is only room for one ego in a kitchen when the crush of service is on”), to the need for paying your dues at each station in the kitchen and the absolute necessity of attention to detail, from the quality of the ingredients to the welcoming smile of the maitre d’.
Something more fascinating than advice and admonitions: the chance to live briefly inside the head of a great chef who keeps more balls in the air than any juggler ever attempted.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-465-00735-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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