Though Stone engages in a few meandering asides and perhaps tries to extract too much meaning from rather prosaic subjects,...
Debut author Stone, Emmy-winning TV producer, wrangles a lively, informative, sometimes-intimate tale from his family's adventure eating a freezer full of beef over two years of culinary and lifestyle change.
The author wanted to feed his family in the most environmentally and ethically responsible way without becoming a caricature of a fad-following New-Age epicure. Solution: whole foods; a whole cow, to be precise. Why beef? Partly as an homage to a Midwestern childhood “near the cattle trails of the High Plains.” But mainly because he wondered how the experience of eating the entire grass-fed animal—free of antibiotics and growth hormones—might affect his mind and body. Cooking it respectfully, learning the vagaries of each individual cut, would also make him more than a passive consumer. It would reacquaint him with where his food actually came from, with ancestral foodways in eclipse, and maybe even help him find a “doorway to a more soulful life.” Stone provides a primer on prime beef (choice, etc.), as well as a cattle history lesson stretching back nearly 9,000 years and a cautionary tale about how the post–World War II obsession with convenience and processed foods not only has deflected us from healthier and more fulfilling means of feeding ourselves, but infected all areas of life with a ticking-clock mentality. More, the author braises his book in his family’s values. Most “charming domestic scenes” one is subjected to are anything but, but Stone's revealing set pieces are warm, winning and welcome. Readers will feel like guests in their home, privy to private fears and joys as well as gastronomic triumphs and catastrophes.
Though Stone engages in a few meandering asides and perhaps tries to extract too much meaning from rather prosaic subjects, he nonetheless offers provocative thoughts on our carnivorous history and contemporary options, adding some tantalizing snout-to-tail recipes.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250052582
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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