Nourishing, truthful reflections on family, friends, and love all wrapped up in the idea of food as sustenance for both the...
A tale of recovery from a broken heart via comfort foods found across the United States.
Within a short period of time, freelance food writer Nunn, who worked for nearly a decade at the New Yorker, lost her brother to suicide and broke up with her fiance and was forced to leave the beautiful apartment they shared. She turned to alcohol to cope, dropping further and further into the gin bottle until she reached out for help. A stint in the hospital and another at the Betty Ford Center helped her realize she was not alone; family and friends were there to assist in any way that they could, which included invitations to visit. Nunn spent the next several months traveling across the country, cooking and collecting recipes for favorite foods, the ones that sprang to mind whenever there was a death, an accident, or a broken heart in need of comfort. During her journey, she learned that everyone has a different food they turn to when they need a form of sustenance beyond filling an empty stomach. It might be a mother’s lime-green gelatin salad from childhood, a country ham biscuit (one of the author’s “very favorite foods”—“funky, potent, leathery, salty ham that has been placed on a biscuit whose edges crumble from crisped fat and whose center is sweet in comparison”), or a silky custard made in a double boiler. Crisscrossing the country, Nunn repaired her fragmented heart as she listened to humorous and moving stories about her relatives and friends. The author includes a few dozen recipes for the comfort foods she describes, resulting in a sort of minicookbook inside a candid memoir of despair and triumph over depression.
Nourishing, truthful reflections on family, friends, and love all wrapped up in the idea of food as sustenance for both the body and the soul.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7420-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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