Delectable reading.
A journalist’s account of the unexpectedly rich life she and her French husband made together after leaving Paris for a small town in southern France.
When a very pregnant Bard (Lunch in Paris, 2010) and her husband, Gwendal, visited Céreste, it was to see the village that had been home to a French poet and Resistance leader named René Char. After they chatted with the daughter of Char’s wartime lover, they discovered that her family was about to sell the house where the poet had lived. The pair bought the house on impulse the next day, certain only of the fact that Céreste was “where [they] would become a family.” A neighbor's move-in gift of a basketful of homegrown vegetables became the symbol of what would quickly become the couple’s organizing principle: food. Not only was it something that, in all its delicious Provençal variety, was one of Bard’s “central pleasures.” It was also the way she would continue to forge an identity for herself apart from her Brooklyn-born mother and her American supermarket tastes. Through sharing recipes—many of which she includes in this book, as in her previous book—Bard negotiated and built relationships with her French friends and extended family. When she realized that pain from her own childhood was preventing her from bonding with her son, cooking with her child became the way she repaired the rift between them and healed her own heart. Gwendal also found his own salvation in food. Faced with a decision to rejoin the corporate world and become an unhappy “cog in the wheel,” he decided instead to open an artisanal ice cream shop with his wife. Like the Provençal food and lifestyle it celebrates, Bard’s book is one to be savored slowly and with care.
Delectable reading.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-24616-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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