A joyous feast of food, travel, and human relationships.
The longtime New Yorker European correspondent gathers a selection of her finest food-and-travel essays.
Kramer (Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman, 2002, etc.) shares 13 pieces that she published in the New Yorker between 2002 and 2017. She divides the book into four sections that emphasize theme over chronology. Part I introduces readers to Kramer’s Upper West Side kitchen, a space where food, writing, and memory are inseparable. She remarks how certain topics—for example, French politics—will inspire her to make certain dishes, such as chicken tagine, which she associates with “the French-speaking sheikh whose wives taught me how to make it.” In Part II, Kramer offers in-depth profiles of respected food writers and chefs from around the world. In one essay, she tells the story of how a mutual interest in Asian cuisine and traveling brought Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid into an elite circle of food scholars; in another, the author narrates how Yotam Ottolenghi, a brilliant philosophy student, followed his passion for cooking from his native Jerusalem to London, where he opened a wildly successful fusion restaurant. The author’s own adventurous spirit takes center stage in Part III, where she reflects on such subjects as her never-ending personal improvement “quest” to collect cookbooks; her quirky interest in root vegetables and forks; and on how an experiment in foraging eventually led her to Denmark and René Redzepi, the forager-chef/visionary behind the world-famous Noma restaurant. In Part IV, Kramer explores the relationship between food and various forms of ritual. She discusses Thanksgiving and her experiments observing this most revered of American traditions during one summer in Italy. As she notes in the concluding essay, celebrations—especially those that include food—mark a “passage from the ordinariness of daily life into the next round of daily life by way of a salubrious diversion.” Eloquent and charmingly loquacious, Kramer's essays are sharp and insightful.
A joyous feast of food, travel, and human relationships.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-07437-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Freelance journalist Shear arrestingly reconstructs a notably bad bargain the US struck with Japan during a period when, despite an immense trade deficit, Washington was willing to pay almost any price to keep the island nation on its side in the Cold War. Drawing on interviews with key players, a wealth of government documents, and contemporary news reports, Shear offers a tellingly detailed, chronological account of how Japan, after almost a decade of effort dating back to the early 1980s, largely got its way on the co-development of the FS-X, an experimental support fighter plane, for the country's militia-like defense forces. The resultant program, the author argues, could give Japan the advanced technology and know-how it needs to become a world-class competitor in aerospace/avionics markets long dominated by American suppliers like Boeing, General Dynamics, and McDonnell Douglas. While his worst-case scenario—that Japan will snatch a sizeable chunk of this crucial export business—remains to be proved, Shear does a fine job of explaining how the steely resolve of career bureaucrats and intra-agency conflicts can influence, even shape or deform, the policy judgments of elected legislators. He also contrasts the patient, end-in-view nationalism of Dai Nihon's single-minded mandarins with the tactical frenzies of US pols who, though not unmindful of economic consequences, tend to favor expedient solutions to epidemic problems. Covered as well are the commercial implications for American industry, whose decisive edge in state- of-the-art software may have been squandered in the cause of a patron/protÇgÇ alliance whose rationale has long since been overtaken by events. A cautionary tale that goes a long way toward clarifying why ``East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'' (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47353-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing work of new ideas on the cutting edge of biology, though not for the uninitiated.
Lavishly illustrated examination of the theory of biological self-organization—territory unfamiliar to most.
The theory of self-organization is an attempt to answer the continuing and ancient question of how the organism develops from a solitary fertilized egg to achieve its final form in maturity. Pivar believes that biology as a discipline has no overarching theoretical principle to explain the process of ontological development. He begins with a detailed description of the tensile strength of the toroidal sphere and how that funnel bi-layer shape is an ideal flexible vessel designed to facilitate the progression from single cell to full-fledged organism. He posits that the specific pattern of development of the species is already encoded at the cellular level and elaborated through physical and chemical dynamic processes. While the genome can specify certain traits of the animal, it cannot account for the process of the developmental sequence of the emerging biological form. In a similar vein, he rejects the principle of random mutation or natural selection precisely because these Darwinian concepts stress the crucial input of the environment in promoting adaptive evolutionary change along a continuum. He describes and illustrates the developmental sequence of flora and fauna from the basic toroidal sphere, stating that every life form grows from the same hypothesized point of origin as the inner layer undergoes continuous embryological transformation that is specific to each animal, flower or insect. The presentation of the biological self-organization theory, unorthodox at best since it minimizes accepted doctrines in biology, is highly disorganized. By immediately discussing and defining the mechanical properties of the torus and more specifically the toroidal sphere, Pivar is launching the reader into highly unfamiliar–and often disorienting–territory, a situation worsened by liberal use of terminology that is discipline-dependent. It is only in the concluding chapters that the relation of the torus principle to ontological and philological development is clarified.
An intriguing work of new ideas on the cutting edge of biology, though not for the uninitiated.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0-9749860-0-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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