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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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