Think becoming a surgeon is tough? Psaltis’s apprenticeship makes a medical internship look relaxing.
Debut memoir describing the author’s ferocious dedication to great food and the long, grinding road he traveled to become a top-flight chef.
Psaltis may be starting his own Manhattan restaurant, but he, like many of his forebears, started at the nadir of the food chain: packing the Dumpster and swabbing the greasy pots at his grandfather’s small diner in Jamaica, Queens. He was ten years old and rarely left the kitchen after that, slowly working his way up to more accomplished positions. In formal, flowing prose (crafted with twin brother Michael, a literary agent), Psaltis explains that when he felt he had learned or achieved all he could in any particular establishment, he would find a better place to work, even though each move up in restaurant quality meant a move down for him in the kitchen hierarchy. It was worth it for the knowledge he gained: about efficiency and speed; about food that is fancy, not fun; about finesse, not flair; about the chef as primary source of energy, dedication, inspiration and atmosphere in the kitchen. It’s hard to imagine a more exacting individual, yet impossible not to admire his dedication: In a chef’s life, he avers, the few hours not devoted to work are largely consumed by (insufficient) sleep. Psaltis is curious and unafraid to experiment, organized and fanatically clean, exacting and refined. Highly attuned to food, he writes that “becoming a chef in your own right . . . means understanding why you were doing each step.” Psaltis became a chef the old-fashioned way, and he has plenty of good stories about what it is like to work your way up in the kitchens of David Bouley, Alain Ducasse and Thomas Keller. He is too proud to talk out of school, but he has no problem explaining his take on the pros and cons of each establishment, and he recalls incredible snafus as well as brilliant creations.
Think becoming a surgeon is tough? Psaltis’s apprenticeship makes a medical internship look relaxing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-7679-1968-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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