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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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