A delectably warm and wise memoir.
An award-winning novelist tells the deliciously candid story of her unconventional path to motherhood.
Abu-Jaber (Birds of Paradise, 2011, etc.) grew up between the polarities of two strong personalities: that of her Arab father, Bud, on the one hand, and her maternal grandmother, Grace, on the other. Adversaries who also happened to agree on many things, they fought for the author’s attention through food: where Bud delighted with his spicy meat dishes, Grace tempted with her divine cakes and cookies. The struggle also centered around their desires for Abu-Jaber's life, with Bud demanding that she wed as soon as she was old enough and her grandmother warning that romance was “lie” and marriage and babies were “for women who [couldn’t] do much else.” Abu-Jaber, however, was determined to create her own life recipe, which proved harder than she imagined. Straight out of college, she married a man who was more convenience than lover and whom she divorced less than a year later. Secretly enchanted by “the idea of marriage,” she wed again in graduate school, this time to an intellectual for whom she felt no passion. In the midst of personal turmoil, her career thrived, but it wasn’t until her mid-30s that she finally settled into a relationship that satisfied her desires rather than those instilled by Bud and Grace. A decade later, Abu-Jaber suddenly found herself wanting to adopt a child, whom she named in honor of the woman who warned her against motherhood. Strong-willed yet tender, Gracie not only taught the author lessons in patience, giving, and self-acceptance. She also became the unexpected apple of Bud’s baby boy–coveting eye and the missing ingredient in an intergenerational recipe for family harmony. Generously seasoned by an abiding love of food and a keen eye for the nuances of human relationships, this book is a reminder that however unpredictable it may be, life is a dish to be savored.
A delectably warm and wise memoir.Pub Date: April 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24909-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
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