A photo-filled cookbook that effectively combines vegan food with lifestyle tips.
Homestyle vegan recipes from a Hawaii-based chef.
Hawaii is the former owner of Caffe Coco in Kauai, Hawaii, and in this debut book, she combines health-forward recipes with a family-friendly approach to cooking. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, the author studied at Le Cordon Bleu and adopted a vegan diet after reading Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin’s book Skinny Bitch (2005). Like Barnouin, the author is a former model: “During my brief modeling career,” Hawaii writes, “I used food to keep my body at a certain weight (it was during the unhealthy waif craze), and my relationship with food became blurred.” This cookbook, she explains, “is a culmination of my journey toward healthfulness.” At the end of 2017, Hawaii sold her cafe so she “could complete this book, write more books, create videos, and teach what I have learned along the way.” The recipes here, featuring plenty of full-color images by multiple photographers, are simple and easy to follow, running the gamut from nut milks and fruit juices to dinner items and desserts. There’s plenty of emphasis on health-conscious vegan foods, including ginger shots, tofu scrambles, and smoothies. But Hawaii also includes a wide range of simple, homestyle dishes, such as sandwiches, soups, and dips. Other notable recipes include her “Coconut Mac Nut Tofu,” the signature dish at her cafe—“It is a great way to get your family to fall in love with tofu”—and a San Francisco avocado sub, inspired by her Bay Area upbringing. “I want my kids’ diet to seem normal, even though we eat vegan,” Hawaii writes, which means plenty of familiar breakfast and dinner foods, from waffles to quesadillas. Recipes also helpfully note whether they’re gluten-free, nut-free, or sugar-free. There’s a useful section on dressings—from Hawaiian Island to Cashew Caesar—and sauces, and Hawaii offers practical advice in the closing pages, which range from her preferences regarding organic brands to a list of her cooking appliances. Although this cookbook doesn’t break any new culinary ground, it’s easy to read and ideal for people who want to eat simply and healthily.
A photo-filled cookbook that effectively combines vegan food with lifestyle tips.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9857152-7-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Deeper Well Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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