The Rachael Ray set will eat up Mathews’s pleasantly fluffy tale of culinary triumph.
How a few pounds of chicken and a jar of Old El Paso salsa changed one family’s life.
Writer/software designer Mathews (The Linden Tree, 2007) and husband Carl work together, travel together and, most importantly, eat together. When Mathews was bitten by the cooking bug, rather than go off half-cocked and open a restaurant, she entered a cooking contest. One competition led to another, and she soon was in the thick of the Pillsbury Bake-Off, at which she took first prize with her recipe for Salsa Couscous Chicken. Not only did the victory earn Mathews a million-dollar prize, but she briefly became a minor celebrity, appearing on Oprah, The Rosie O’Donnell Show and in the New York Times. Thanks to this small, unprepossessing book, her 15 minutes of fame isn’t up quite yet. Enthusiastic and sharp but grounded in reality (unlike some competitive cookers), the author comes off here as a less-than-gourmet version of Julie Powell (Julie & Julia, 2005). Like Powell, Mathews is sweet and self-deprecating—at one point, she notes, “When I present something I’ve cooked, I tend to apologize”—but her demeanor masks true seriousness of purpose. Look past the casual attitude and the cutesy one-liners, and you realize that she was genuinely proud of her victory, so much so that she spends much of the book’s first half explaining the history and extolling the virtues of the Bake-Off. Readers seeking useful recipes or food-industry dirt would be better served checking out something by Mario Batali or Anthony Bourdain, but those looking for a nice little story about how eight chicken thighs can earn you seven figures, look no further.
The Rachael Ray set will eat up Mathews’s pleasantly fluffy tale of culinary triumph.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-425-21945-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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