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 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
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