Enchanting, funny, and perceptive reflections on recovering from a disastrous love affair, woven together with recipes for making jams, jellies, and pickles. Bull literally preserved herself from despair after her lover called in news of his new affair during a dinner party they were both supposed to be hosting. Ridding herself of everything that belonged to him, she found a bag of wild huckleberries he had picked and turned them into jam. String beans from his garden became dill beans in her grandmother's old blue Ball jars. Why canning and not baking bread? Canning is ``a Zen thing,'' requiring total attention to a ``world in which things turn out the way you thought they would.'' But Bull doesn't simply lock herself in her kitchen watching fruit boil. She takes off into the wider world in search of healing. Her trips range from hiking in Utah to scuba diving in the Bahamas to seeking in India, where palm leaves are read and guru Sai Baba speaks to her through another. She also tries, and skewers, the kind of therapy workshops that give healing a bad name. After every adventure she returns home to ruminate on what she's learned and can whatever is in season. Each chapter ends with a recipe, ranging from classic raspberry jam to Mexican hot pickled vegetables to dandelion jelly (the blue jelly of the title—she was out of yellow food coloring). Don't skip the recipes: Tucked between directions for sterilizing the Ball jars and boiling the fruit juice are delicious anecdotes, many about the celebrities she's interviewed for magazines such as Rolling Stone and Interview. Warm, funny, plump with insight, a book that readers will pass on to friends and friends of friends, whether they're recovering from broken hearts or in need of a recipe for blueberry butter.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7868-6255-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
