Global discoveries in pasta and wedlock by the Chinese-American author of Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China (2008).
Newly married, having started a cooking school in Beijing (Black Sesame Kitchen) and still restlessly seeking new tastes and adventures, Lin-Liu resolved to travel the Silk Road, from Beijing to Rome, to explore how the art of making noodles evolved, from northwestern Chinese pulled noodles and dumplings to ravioli and risotto. Indeed, the author first had to settle the chicken-or-the-egg question: Did Marco Polo really introduce pasta to Italy after his trip east, or was pasta already enjoyed long before by the Etruscans? (A 4,000-year-old millet noodle was found in 2005 in Lajia but has since disintegrated.) Closing her cooking school and taking along her cooking teacher, her chef and her new American husband for the first leg of the journey by train north, to the land of the noodles, Lin-Liu proceeds by weaving autobiographical details into her percolating account—e.g., that she grew up under Taiwanese parents predominantly eating rice. She also provides historical lore; for example, wheat flour originated in Iran many thousands of years ago, yet the Chinese did not begin eating wheat noodles until the third century. Moving westward, from China through Tibet and further west to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey, poking into kitchens or observing chefs, she and her husband, who was more indulgent than enthusiastic, coming along largely for safety, penetrated confounding ethnic zones where the natives largely claimed noodles as their own, creating dishes with distinctive regional flavors. Ultimately, the travelers’ arrival in Italy, where they made pasta with the sfoglias (female pasta pros), feels anticlimactic. A footloose, spontaneous and appetite-whetting journal of culinary adventure.
Pub Date: July 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-726-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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