by Doug Psaltis with Michael Psaltis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2005
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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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
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