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 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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