After initially disdaining a career in food as one devoid of “meaning and purpose,” she finds both here.
In this provocative debut, a renowned chef finds her fulfillment as a writer.
Though a passion for food provides Hamilton’s theme and focus, her passion for writing distinguishes this memoir from similar behind-the-kitchen volumes. In fact, her accomplishment as the owner and chef of Prune, in New York City, seems less like destiny than the result of a series of detours, from the broken family that left her to support herself with a series of food jobs since her early teens, when petty crime and casual drugs also marked her life, through her on-again/off-again college studies that culminated in an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan. “I was not looking to open a restaurant,” she writes of the quixotic leap she made into the profession—despite never having worked as a chef, written a business plan or had any idea of the legal processes involved in converting an abandoned space into a tiny bistro that would quickly come to gross almost $2 million a year. While the centerpiece of the book is an amazing chapter that finds the foundation of Prune—its spirit of hospitality—in her experiences as an impoverished international vagabond, the restaurant provides only one dimension of the narrative’s richness. In a manner that is never glib or sentimental, Hamilton proceeds from the childhood innocence of her family’s unraveling through the life of a precocious hustler for whom introspection was a luxury through the romantic complications of leaving her longtime female lover for the Italian man she would marry. This union that would provide her with something like the family she had lost decades earlier, but a marriage that would prove both turbulent and unconventional (the couple had two children in their first seven years of marriage without living together).
After initially disdaining a career in food as one devoid of “meaning and purpose,” she finds both here.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6872-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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