A cozy, touching story.
American journalist Bard traces her relationship with her French husband from the first lunch date to the present, framing the narrative around mouthwatering menus.
The book starts out vanilla, but the author’s charming narrative and penetrating insights quickly add a subtle complexity that will captivate readers. Having met her future husband Gwendal at an academic conference in London, Bard soon invented an excuse to visit Paris. Eventually she moved in to Gwendal’s tiny apartment and began her initiation into Parisian life. She pleasantly details her joys and obstacles, including her difficulties with grumpy fishmongers and complicated meat-market lines, and she provides poignant revelations about cultural differences that are alternately easy to overcome and seemingly insurmountable. The idea of love conquering all is certainly a cliché, but the author’s unique voice prevents her story from becoming stale. One of the most enlightening aspects of French culture that Bard reveals is the fact that in Paris, the customer is not always right. Whether it’s the chef for the wedding hors d’oeuvres or the doctor treating her father-in-law’s colon cancer, the author learned that one must bow to the opinion of the professional. Ultimately, Paris had much to offer Bard, including lessons in how to cook delectable meals with whatever is at hand, or the simplicity of sitting in a café and relaxing with a coffee and croissant. Despite the many delicious recipes, the motif of food only provides a loose framework for the book, leaving the narrative somewhat disjointed in places. This does not, however, diminish Bard’s entertaining voice.
A cozy, touching story.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04279-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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