by Jeannie Marshall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2014
Marshall’s clear, direct book ably captures the frustrations of trying to find the healthiest path and inspiring kids to do...
Teaching kids “to learn the simple pleasures of the table and to appreciate the taste of real food.”
The childhood obesity epidemic gets a fair amount of coverage in the American press, often with a slant on how unhealthy eating leaves us less competitive in the global marketplace. The eating habits abroad have shifted as well, however; as American exports of fast food, convenience foods and cooking shortcuts have seeped into other cultures, the health effects have slowly emerged. Journalist Marshall and her husband moved to Italy in the early 2000s and immersed themselves in the food culture. Childless, they were free to indulge in the authentic cuisine of their new home. When the author gave birth to their first child, the family’s shopping needs shifted to include an extra mouth to feed. Marshall began to perceive a subtle change—at first slight, with parent-peers still working to incorporate classical traditions in their cooking, but increasingly toward convenience foods as her son started school. The author explores the changes in eating on both a macro and micro level—how global economics has shifted the priority for simple carbohydrates into regions and countries with their own storied cultures and patterns of eating, based off generations of cuisine built around locally produced foods. Marshall also examines the public relations machine that offers a solution for harried mothers and fathers who go into parenting with the best of intentions but find their resolve eroded by a constant message from the food industry to buy cereal bars, crackers, cookies and yogurt and feel satisfied about it—maybe it’s organic or doesn’t contain high-fructose corn syrup, and it’s “packed with nutrients.”
Marshall’s clear, direct book ably captures the frustrations of trying to find the healthiest path and inspiring kids to do the same.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3299-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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by Helen Fremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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by Laura Schroff & Alex Tresniowski ; illustrated by Barry Root
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