French cuisine once was unassailable, the West's finest, but while its influence has diminished even in France—as have many...
The Art of Eating magazine founder Behr (50 Foods, 2013, etc.) serves as an admirable traveling companion through the world of French cuisine, offering high sailing on gustatory seas as well as grounding in history and broader cultural concerns.
“France is the greatest country for bread, cheese and wine,” writes the author, “and its culinary techniques are the foundation of the training of nearly every serious Western cook and some beyond.” However, determining what is definably French is more elusive, given its diversity, global influences, and the fact that there are really two Frances: Paris and the rest of the country. In reintroducing us to French food, Behr's attempts to secure this definition are mixed but generally engaging. He is most successful in his evocation of the spirit of French cuisine, its origins, and numerous ironies, though his chapters could have utilized a more logical progression and less (save for connoisseurs) technical exposition. Still, from classical and nouvelle cuisine to an unparalleled world of wine and fromage, Behr goes behind the scenes to reveal the hows and whys of French food in all its manifestations, each allied to a desire for balance, harmony, and sensual pleasure. The story of French food “is disproportionally the story of food in Paris,” the author writes, but he takes us on a detailed gastronomic tour of the entire country, including those regions whose tastes don't seem terribly “French” to outsiders. He also affords readers an informed survey of the finest writers on French food, including the 20th-century critic and author Curnonsky (aka Maurice Edmond Sailland) and the American expatriate writer Richard Olney, while celebrating the minuet danced by server and served in a good French restaurant.
French cuisine once was unassailable, the West's finest, but while its influence has diminished even in France—as have many of the dishes that established its reputation—French food still commands a certain fascination, and Behr explores it with appetizing ardor.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-452-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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