Frustrations whisked into a tasty treat of a story.
Giada De Laurentiis meets Candace Bushnell in this debut memoir from romantically challenged yet resilient Melucci.
The author grew up Catholic, Italian and squeaky-clean in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Melucci’s mother played a consequential role in shaping her personality and taste buds, but the most touching early sections revolve around her father, an Italian immigrant. He was a serious man more concerned with facilitating his children’s education than fostering a sense of intimacy, but they grew closer when Melucci studied Italian and art history in college. He was pleased to share his native culture and food with her, and took her to Salerno to meet her Italian relatives. He died three days before she graduated from college; she still cherishes the envelope on which he wrote an impromptu note expressing his love when she was studying in Florence. Melucci warily moved to Manhattan, where she quickly—much to her surprise—landed both a man and a job. Her career as a book publicist, then VP for public relations at Harper’s magazine, proved to be a lot steadier than her love life. First there was Kit, who preferred alcohol to angel hair; Ethan, who loved halibut but hated cohabitation; and Mitch, the friend-with-benefits for whom Melucci made bowls of peppery farfalle. Her memoir is strewn with numerous other relatable scenarios and stereotypical lovers, none as satisfying as the homemade and borrowed recipes that accompany each escapade. Using cooking as catharsis after crumbled relationships, Melucci sprinkles sweet and savory homespun meals, ranging from traditional to eclectic, among anecdotes describing the angst of dating in your 30s. The urban backdrop includes Brooklyn’s budding neighborhoods, Greenwich Village’s underground music scene and SoHo’s sleek eateries. In the absence of a reliable male companion, strolling the aisles of Dean & DeLuca gets Melucci’s heart pumping.
Frustrations whisked into a tasty treat of a story.Pub Date: April 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-53442-0
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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