A heartening memoir of good food and tough love with a few down-home recipes thrown in.
A memoir of an untrained chef with an English degree who set out to temper bad behavior by serving good food and to change junk-food die-hards into foodies.
When Barnes took a job as a cook for the Alpha Sigma Phi house on the University of Washington campus, she knew “that ‘frat boy’ was shorthand for ‘arrogant, drunk, and disorderly,’ ” but she didn’t know that house chefs were generally glorified warmers of precooked meals. Her new job came with major challenges. The kitchen—with its “archaic gas range,” freezer held together with duct tape and a rat in the pantry—was a nightmare, requiring critter control and rigorous scrubbing and disinfecting. Though frat-house jobs were on the bottom rung of the chef hierarchy, for Barnes, a job in which customers respected her was a dream compared with her stint as a chef for a demanding family or at a cafe, where the health violations were frequently flagrant. At least in the Alpha Sig kitchen, she called the shots—often laced with expletives. When the rowdy, grungy frat-house atmosphere, the guys ignoring her kitchen rules and the uncooperative vendors got to her, she vented. Thankfully, her humor, honesty and a steadfast vision save the book from becoming one long rant. Resistant at first, the guys grew to love her food. Eventually, she gained the respect and friendship of the vendors, and the reputation of her table grew. Sorority girls often raided her pantry for leftovers and left fan notes. The book is as much about nourishment as it is food. Barnes’ affection for the fraternity brothers carries the narrative. It wasn’t all about consuming, it was about connecting,” she writes.
A heartening memoir of good food and tough love with a few down-home recipes thrown in.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2477-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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