A rollicking, tongue-in-cheek guidebook to discovering one’s own route through life.
Transplanted New Yorker Hart’s idea of creating a fake cooking show began as a joke for a friend in California. At last count, her YouTube channel, “My Drunk Kitchen,” had tallied more than 66 million views. Hart’s “cookbook” will surely enlarge her audience and please her fans.
The author, who dedicates the book to “reckless optimists,” has been featured in numerous magazines including Time, LA Weekly and Marie Claire, as well as on CBS News, and her 2012 YouTube documentary “Please Subscribe” won the 2013 Steamy Award for Best Female Performance in a Comedy. Hart’s wacky sense of humor carries on in this collection of drink suggestions, which includes fun recipes, cooking tips, photos, quotes and life lessons. Whether the author is elaborating on the basics of kitchen improvisation and “filling your heart as well as your stomach,” embracing the bumpy journey toward adulthood, or exploring the boundaries of love and sexuality, Hart remains entertaining. In the section entitled “So This Is Love,” the author includes recipes for Hot-Crossed Bunz, Heart-Beet Salad, Brothel Sprouts and Sad Thai. “I feel like the people we find ourselves drawn to are somehow reflections of the love we were given (or denied) as children,” she writes. “And this could manifest as unconditional loyalty or devotion to people who don’t necessarily classify as healthy and/or functional human beings.” Hart devotes another section to coping with family during the holidays. The author’s recipe for Trifle Troubles alludes to the trauma of leaving the comfort of your adult life and revisiting “the emotional baggage of your childhood,” while Let’s Get Grilled (About Your Life Choices) traverses the troubled terrain of communicating with a less-than-understanding father “who never achieved his goals.”
A rollicking, tongue-in-cheek guidebook to discovering one’s own route through life.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062293039
Page Count: 240
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
PROFILES
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
