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 handful of pearls amid a pile of empty oyster shells.
Bestselling author Haig offers a book’s worth of apothegms to serve as guides to issues ranging from disquietude to self-acceptance.
Like many collections of this sort—terse snippets of advice, from the everyday to the cosmic—some parts will hit home with surprising insight, some will feel like old hat, and others will come across as disposable or incomprehensible. Years ago, Haig experienced an extended period of suicidal depression, so he comes at many of these topics—pain, hope, self-worth, contentment—from a hard-won perspective. This makes some of the material worthy of a second look, even when it feels runic or contrary to experience. The author’s words are instigations, hopeful first steps toward illumination. Most chapters are only a few sentences long, the longest running for three pages. Much is left unsaid and left up to readers to dissect. On being lost, Haig recounts an episode with his father when they got turned around in a forest in France. His father said to him, “If we keep going in a straight line we’ll get out of here.” He was correct, a bit of wisdom Haig turned to during his depression when he focused on moving forward: “It is important to remember the bottom of the valley never has the clearest view. And that sometimes all you need to do in order to rise up again is to keep moving forward.” Many aphorisms sound right, if hardly groundbreaking—e.g., a quick route to happiness is making someone else happy; “No is a good word. It keeps you sane. In an age of overload, no is really yes. It is yes to having space you need to live”; “External events are neutral. They only gain positive or negative value the moment they enter our mind.” Haig’s fans may enjoy this one, but others should take a pass.
A handful of pearls amid a pile of empty oyster shells.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313666-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Life
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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