An inspiring and informative guide to the foods of Italy.
A comprehensive introduction to Italian cuisine by an expert.
If traveling to Italy isn’t in the cards, there’s always this sunny, satisfying armchair tour of Italian cuisine and history. Garrubbo, the Italian American author of Sunday Pasta (2014) and the editor of the Garrubbo Guide website, distills decades of immersion in Italian cooking into his new book. He takes an appropriately broad view of his topic: The book’s first part covers Italian geography, culture, and history, and Garrubbo stresses the integral role that food traditions play in Italian life. A section titled “The Six Ms” details the roles that mothers, memory, and time-tested methods of food preparation play in this dynamic. Garrubbo explains the structure of an Italian meal from aperitivo to digestivo, and then highlights each specific element. One entire section is devoted to pasta and another to the wines of Italy. There’s also a review of the country’s engaging regional traditions. The prose is clear, as are the helpful and well-organized tables and illustrations. This isn’t a dry textbook; Garrubbo’s passion for his subject is apparent in the compelling details that he scatters throughout the book, including appetizing tidbits about the regional origins and history of popular types of Italian breads. For instance, he notes that pane carasau, a thin, crisp Sardinian bread, is also called carta da musica because its paperlike texture is reminiscent of sheet music. And although this volume isn’t a cookbook, it still succeeds as a helpful kitchen reference; for instance, chapters on olive oil and vinegar offer specifics on how these condiments are used in cooking. There’s also a chart of the most commonly used spices that includes the Italian and English names for each herb. Overall, Garrubbo is the best sort of tour guide—enthusiastic, entertaining, and emotionally involved in his subject. A glossary and bibliography further enhance the work.
An inspiring and informative guide to the foods of Italy.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9890291-2-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A lively, thoughtful self-help book—sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.
Life lessons gleaned from the work of a musical theater master.
Drama professor and devoted fan Schoch, author of Shakespeare’s House, lovingly explores Stephen Sondheim’s musicals, aiming to show how they can help people achieve a more fulfilling life. “His works understand us as much as we understand them,” the author avers. Zeroing in on 13 shows, he enthusiastically walks us through the essence of each to demonstrate that “Sondheim, if we let him, can change our life.” Schoch notes that in his first musical, Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim tried to impart the lesson, “Be aware of the roles that you enact in your life,” but it was a flop because he forgot to “put the audience first.” He never forgot it again. Gypsy tells the story of a toxic mother-daughter relationship, but the vivid characterizations expressed in song demonstrate that “hurtful patterns can be disrupted and then replaced by the benevolence of a nurturing heart, beginning with our own.” In the plotless Company, Sondheim anatomizes the “loneliness of modern urban life,” then suggests how we can overcome it in the song “Sorry-Grateful” (a “true masterpiece”). “Whenever I hear the quintet in A Little Night Music warming up,” Schoch writes, “I hear a rehearsal for life.” Sweeney Todd, the ultimate revenge piece, asks us how we would respond to injustice. Merrily We Roll Along, poorly received when it opened in 1981 but a Tony-winning hit in 2024, oozes with feelings of personal regret. On Sunday in the Park With George, Schoch remarks, “How can we not pay attention to a play that honors so elegantly the lost art of paying attention?” Into the Woods confronts “not knowing which path to choose,” and Schoch softly brings down the curtain with Here We Are, which opened in 2023, two years after Sondheim’s death: “a perfect theatrical non finito: not finished, and that’s by design.”
A lively, thoughtful self-help book—sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781668030592
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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