Readers will be delighted to participate vicariously in the globetrotting feast of an inquisitive glutton who remembers that...
A book-length quest to understand the 21st century’s international gastronomic revolution.
It’s characteristic of London Observer restaurant critic and occasional novelist of some wit Rayner (The Oyster House Siege, 2007, etc.) that he can find fault even with the agreeable task of eating his way toward the world’s perfect meal. On the one hand, his job allows him to sit in restaurants “eating extraordinary food and having Dom Pérignon squeezed into my mouth from a South Seas sponge.” On the other, he rubs shoulders with wealthy Michelin-star worshippers: “self-satisfied, self-abusing, arguments for involuntary euthanasia.” The combination of zest for glorious gastronomic abundance and the nagging sensation that he’s propping up a corrupt system of gilded-age excess gives Rayner’s book a real-world frisson that rarely finds its way into food writing. Giving readers the grand tour without forgetting how much everything costs, he jets to modern foodie capitals from the expected (Paris and New York) to the surprising but appropriate (Dubai and Las Vegas). Though the author is hardly above hobnobbing with star chefs like Jöel Robuchon and cover-blurb-providing Mario Batali, he’s not afraid to stick it to those he considers not up to the task; Gordon Ramsay, who blurbed earlier Rayner books, gets a good dressing down in this one. A sharp-tongued hacker and slasher of food and chefs he doesn’t care for, such as Moscow’s kitschy, obscenely expensive and underwhelming Café Pushkin, Rayner is a besotted devotee when he finds something he loves. At the heavenly Okei-Sushi restaurant in Tokyo, the tab was $475, “the most I had ever paid for a single meal, though in my state of rapture, it seemed irrelevant.”
Readers will be delighted to participate vicariously in the globetrotting feast of an inquisitive glutton who remembers that somebody has to pay for it all.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8669-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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