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
Following in the monosyllabic wake of Katharine Hepburn's Me comes Bacall's Now: essays on love, work, children, and friendship. They're a bit makeshift but very human and, finally, offer a likable portrait of an interesting, complex survivor. For those who haven't heard from Bacall since her 1979 autobiography By Myself, she's a bit lonely. She's married off her children, and they all have a pretty good relationship, even though everyone has had ups and downs. She's trying to sell her house in Amagansett, N.Y., because she's not there enough, what with trips to London and Paris. She's ``traveling solo'': no men on the horizon, though at this point she feels she could align herself with Mr. Right. But is he ever hard to find! If the truth be told, there's never been anyone to match Bogie (and this, Bacall says, is the right spelling). In fact, these days she's practically channeling him (``the core of Bogie resides in me''). It's hard to get work even for a legend, and work is what has always defined her. So she's feeling a little tender and wondering what the future holds in store and after all, no one said life was easy. She emerges, even with a mantel full of little Henry Moores and memories of an amazing list of friends (Lenny Bernstein, Spence Tracy, Larry and Vivien, etc.), like an American woman approaching 70. She's a classy Jewish mother who tries to remain nonjudgmental as her only daughter, Leslie, is married by a Tibetan priest. And Bogie's baby is a grandma (she doesn't babysit). In describing how she took Leslie to the L.A. house on Mapleton Drive that she shared with Bogart and their two young children, she tries hard to show us that they were not just celluloid myths—they were real. Bacall's reminiscences of famous people are a little too dutiful. (Where is her famous sense of humor?) But her documentation of getting older, like Hepburn's, is real and recognizable to the aging rest of us. (40 b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 200,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-57412-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Another big Lenny B. bio, jam-packed with accomplishment and angst. This is not a terrible book, and there are occasional passages of nice insight. Ultimately, however, the limitations that biographer Secrest admits at the outset prove to be too much for her. She is not a music historian, her previous subjects mostly having been figures from architecture and the visual arts (Frank Lloyd Wright, 1992, etc.), and her self-professed inability to evaluate Bernstein as composer exacerbates the inherent difficulties of writing his life so soon after his death. ``Various family members, close friends, and colleagues'' refused to talk to her because the Bernstein estate was contracted to another biographer (presumably Humphrey Burton, author of Leonard Bernstein, p. 260); for the same reason, she did not have access to the ``vast Bernstein archives.'' There were, of course, still plenty of folks who would talk (and talk and talk) to her about the maestro, and they had a lot to say, on every now-familiar subject from L.B.'s ambivalent sexuality to his podium manners, his business acumen, and his skills as father and teacher. If it were not for the thematic and chronological connective passages that display Secrest's skill as a biographer, the book could be called Reminiscences on Bernstein. Predictably, not all of the lengthy, sometimes rambling, quotations are of equal merit; all are self- interested and some don't make sense. We hear much about Bernstein's conflicts—conducting vs. composing, his attraction to men vs. women—but in the absence of an overview of his creative legacy (which simply may not be possible at this early date), the reader winds up feeling merely exhausted by Lenny's energy level. Another book for the growing shelf from which some Maynard Solomon or musical Walter Jackson Bate will have to winnow when the time comes to write a critical biography rather than the Bernstein story. (100 b&w photos) (First printing of 35,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40731-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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