bookshelf

THE SEASONING OF A CHEF

Name: THE SEASONING OF A CHEF
Author: Doug Psaltis
ISBN: 0-7679-1968-8

MY JOURNEY FROM DINER TO DUCASSE AND BEYOND

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.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)