International restaurateur Lang takes stock of his life's path from small-town Hungary to the summits of world dining—and has fun along the way. Lang (The Cuisine of Hungary) was involved in the creation of the Tower Suite in the Time-Life building in New York City, the Indian Pavilion theater-restaurant at the New York World's Fair, and, more recently, the reopening of the CafÇ des Artistes on Manhattan's West Side. He recalls warmly that his family believed in the sacredness of food and music: ``Bread was almost as important to us as air, water, life itself.'' Lang takes no small pride in his many accomplishments, and his cheerfulness is interrupted only in recounting the inferno of his Jewish family's wartime experience: After kissing his parents good-bye at a railway station in February 1944, at age 19—he would never see them again, later learning they perished at Auschwitz—he spent time in a forced labor camp. Later, Lang and a friend managed to survive in wartime Budapest by presenting themselves as Transylvanians. Out of desperation, they joined the fascist Arrowcross militia but used their influence to aid the city's Jews. After Budapest's liberation, Lang was wrongly imprisoned for a period as a fascist. Finally immigrating to New York City, he began waiting tables in 1946, working his way into management jobs at the Waldorf-Astoria and the Four Seasons. In the uncreative US food climate of the '50s, Lang was an innovator, exploring ethnic foods of various cultures while always insisting on the freshest seasonal ingredients. He joyously depicts the members of his social circle, which has included such luminaries as James Beard and Luciano Pavarotti, and offers a selection of favorite recipes. Lang's wartime experiences were horrifying, but his book is mainly a lighthearted celebration of good friends, good food, and the good life he's found in the culinary world. (40 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45094-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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