Not quite a memoir or a cookbook, this affectionate biography of a friendship vividly illustrates the importance of cooking...
An account of the friendship between Austin reporter Sweets and noted columnist Molly Ivins, complete with recipes they cooked together.
The narrative calls to mind a hot evening sitting on a front porch, shooting the breeze and drinking beer with friends. Stories are swapped, not in any particular order, but rather as the spirit moves the assembled party. And Sweets has assembled quite a party: Friends, colleagues, family members and admirers of the late Ivins share tales of her famously sharp political wit, her dedication to her beliefs and her culinary mishaps and triumphs. The author reminds us frequently that though Ivins was a private woman, she connected to others through food. Readers who loved her prose can now also love her Four Seasons Fancy Chocolate Cake and her Ouefs Brouille. Though several of the recipes are extremely time-consuming, there are also less-complicated versions of famously complicated dishes (see “Cassoulet, Sorta”). To replicate the front-porch feeling, it might be best to scan the recipes and then read the accompanying anecdotes while your African Chicken is simmering. There is no real narrative arc and little discernible organization; the book could be either amiably rambling or lackadaisically unglued, depending on the reader’s fondness for long, interminable post-dinner conversations rendered in prose. The author overuses the technique of using paragraph breaks and short sentences to create drama, but otherwise the stories are funny, touching and revealing—and augmented with plenty of photos.
Not quite a memoir or a cookbook, this affectionate biography of a friendship vividly illustrates the importance of cooking to one of the 20th century’s most beloved progressive writers and activists.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-292-72265-1
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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
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
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