A challenging author continues to bravely bare his soul along with his best dishes.
BaoHaus celebrity chef Huang (Fresh Off the Boat, 2012) returns with a fresh mélange of hip-hop patter, Chengdu street cuisine, and Asian-American identity politics.
Can a politically charged, wildly successful chef find love and happiness in the new millennium? The author was determined to find out after bumping into Dena at a popular bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But before he could take that leap into the foreign land of commitment, he decided that he had to address something else that had been eating at him for a while. Sure, he has been able to conquer hipster palates with his Taiwanese steamed buns, but what Huang truly hungers to know is what Chinese people living in the homeland think of his cooking: “I’m Chinese, but I grew up in America. What if I’m a fraud?” With his romance with Dena still blossoming, Huang corralled his brothers and headed for China. His initial impression of the city of Chengdu isn’t necessarily appetizing, but it’s vivid: “a disgusting mummy lair accented with a touch of pre–Cory Booker Newark, neatly encased in a delicious cocoon of coal smog…the views are so spectacularly putrid that it makes West Philly feel like Queen Anne’s world.” Huang possesses a fiery descriptive flair capable of splicing disparate cultural references with the acuity of a yakitori grill master: “Paris’ll put you to bed with butter and burgundy; Houston’ll drip it up in au jus and drape it out with horseradish; and Chengdu’ll set your mouth on fire, then extinguish it with Newport [cigarettes] guts.” The lingo is dense and can veer wildly from delicate descriptions of the author’s all-time culinary favorites to his decidedly eccentric bathroom habits. But when he reaches full boil, Huang’s exchanges between family and friends can be laugh-out-loud funny. Once fully communed with his Chinese roots, Huang realized that he needed Dena by his side, and what began in Brooklyn finally came to fruition in China.
A challenging author continues to bravely bare his soul along with his best dishes.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9546-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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