Not your typical chef’s memoir, for sure, but more a litany of problems than a satisfying appraisal of either a life or a...
Clark mixes kitchen gossip with single-parent guilt and tops it with a smattering of recipes.
“Cooking was the only thing that gave me that elusive feeling of accomplishment,” she discovered after leaving a stressful office job to start her own, just-as-stressful marketing firm. So Clark went to cooking school and initially dreamed of raising fatted geese on a Virginia farm. She quickly changed her plans after jettisoning an alcoholic husband. As the sole provider for two young daughters, Clark didn’t have the luxury of starting off as a line cook and working her way up. Instead, she took a position at a Charlottesville winery at $5 an hour, with a 160-mile commute. She soon left for the stylish Morrison-Clark Inn in Washington, D.C., rising to sous-chef after two years. From there she took a job as chef at Northern Virginia’s Evening Star Café. The restaurant’s new owners had big ideas but little cash; unable to reach a compromise with them, she handed in her notice and took a gig at Breadline, a fast-paced bakery and lunch spot in downtown D.C. This proved to be another poor fit, as did two subsequent gigs at the Broad Street Grill and Mrs. Simpson’s, “a dusty old place named for the Duchess of Windsor.” Clark ultimately quit all three kitchens, though these were not easy decisions when her personal life was also in crisis: Her elder daughter was failing elementary school, and her younger was dangerously thin, refusing to eat. Clark opened her own Colorado Kitchen in 2001, and things have been better.
Not your typical chef’s memoir, for sure, but more a litany of problems than a satisfying appraisal of either a life or a profession.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36693-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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