Name-dropping with relish.
An outrageously fun memoir from novelist and longtime New York magazine dining critic Greene that reads more like Who-I-Slept-With rather than What-I-Ate.
Greene, an upper-middle-class girl from Detroit, apparently tall and buxom, talked her way into bedding Elvis by age 21, in 1956, and from then on, nothing would stop her in love and career. “I was born hungry,” she declares, referring to her appetite for both sex and food. In amusing, provocative vignettes, many sealed with a cozy favorite recipe (“Danish Meat Loaf”), she scampers through her 30-year career as dining critic for New York magazine. She discusses her travels to France and sexual emancipation during the swinging ’60s; her long marriage to New York Times cultural critic and fellow foodie Don Forst; and numerous spectacular adulteries during her heyday in the ’70s. Her novels are inspired by her sexcapades, specifically Doctor Love, which tracks her romance with porn star Jamie Gillis. Early freelance journalism for Cosmopolitan and others allowed Greene to interview stars like Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, and she chronicles in purring detail her affairs with both (“Would I have done it just for the story?” she asks. “I wouldn’t have not done it for anything”). Friendships with Craig Claiborne and Belgian publicist Yanou Collart opened doors for her and transformed her from a parvenu abroad into a veritable VIP; through James Beard, she first met Alice Waters, though Greene admits she admired the West Coasters from afar and remained a “hopelessly elitist voice speaking for a manic majority.” Lively and large-spirited, her account sizzles.
Name-dropping with relish.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57699-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
IN THE NEWS
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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