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 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
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