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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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