Recipes for bagels, spiced onion clusters, white clam pizza—and more—add further flavor to an entertaining memoir.
A food blogger chronicles his rocky road to success.
From childhood, Levine (Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, 2005, etc.) reports in an effusive, often self-deprecating memoir, he gravitated “toward the most delicious food I could find.” He loved to eat, to discover out-of-the-way restaurants, and to recommend hidden gems to friends. After working unhappily in advertising, he finally was able to turn that passion into a career. In the 1990s, his books New York Eats and New York Eats (More) won praise (restaurant critic Ruth Reichl called him the “missionary of the delicious”) and led to a local cable TV show, a short-lived show on public radio, and gigs as a freelancer. But with a wife and son to support, he needed a more secure way of making a living. His first idea was to launch EATv to give him a forum for his many food stories; when he failed to find backing, he came up with the idea of a food blog, Ed Levine Eats, where he could be both editor and star. “I loved everything about blogging,” he writes. “I love the soapbox that it gave me, allowing me to proselytize about the food and the purveyors I felt so passionately about.” He leaped into the blogosphere with high hopes: “Belief, passion, and willful naiveté are the first-time entrepreneur’s best friends.” However, the reality proved to be grueling. Levine recounts in detail the frustrations he faced as he tried to raise money, solicit advertising, and assemble a team of talented, energetic employees for a site he called Serious Eats. Forced into “constant money-raising mode,” he found some support from family and friends but also faced repeated rejections from potential advertisers and, after nearly a decade, when he decided to sell the blog, from would-be buyers. “The day-to-day was exhausting,” he writes, “a never-ending financial crisis.” Finally, he found a buyer, and Serious Eats, he reports delightedly, is thriving.
Recipes for bagels, spiced onion clusters, white clam pizza—and more—add further flavor to an entertaining memoir.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53354-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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