Food as a way to remember or a way to forget—either way, Abu-Jaber gets it just right.
Stories of family and food that spread out like pancake batter on a griddle are about “grace, difference, faith, and love,” writes Abu-Jaber (Crescent, 2003, etc.).
Abu-Jaber is the daughter of a Jordanian father and an American mother (though there’s also a German grandmother thrown into the mix, who adds rigorous counterpoint to the wayward intuitiveness of Abu-Jaber’s father). The stem of the narrative is about the author’s precollege youth, an appealing sequence about making and losing friends, testing the waters, endeavoring to find a way forward. Its foliage is a swarming recollection of food and exile; though Abu-Jaber’s father immigrated to the US of his own free will, he feels the bite of his homeland enough to move the family there for a year. What soothes the Jordan in his heart is a piping knaffea, or a “shish kebab that comes like an emergency,” eaten hot off the grill. Abu-Jaber, too, will be shaped by food, both her father’s and that of the immigrants around her: she wants to confess her sins after her first bite of panna cotta, and she warms her frostbitten toes in a bowl of Arabic soup made of bright herbs and orange peels. Her father is restless, moving the family here and there, the geography fluid while the daughter’s social life is constrained by the father’s edicts. But if he is protective on the fatherly front, he is expansive when it comes to food and, more affectingly, to the stories of his family. Abu-Jaber’s tales are equally powerful and lovely in their imagery, from the faux pas of barbequing in their front yard in the US to the car ride they take late at night, to the Dead Sea, where the road is “dusty blue and smells like the woolly heat of a sheep’s back.”
Food as a way to remember or a way to forget—either way, Abu-Jaber gets it just right.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42304-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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