Tasty morsels delivered quickly and reliably.
A quest. With eggrolls.
Debut author Lee, a New York Times metro reporter, has been fascinated by the culturally mixed nature of Chinese restaurants ever since she discovered from reading The Joy Luck Club in middle school that fortune cookies are not Chinese. “It was like learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus,” writes this ABC (American-born Chinese), who never thought to wonder why the food in those white takeout cartons tasted nothing like Mom’s home cooking. But she didn’t become really obsessed until March 30, 2005, when a surprisingly large batch of lottery-ticket buyers across the country scored some big money in a Powerball drawing with numbers they got from fortune cookies. Lee drew up a list of the restaurants that had served the Powerball winners and used that as a jumping-off point for a trip that covered 42 states and included stops at eateries ranging from no-frills chow mein joints to upscale dim sum parlors. As she explored this vast sector of the food-service world—there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger Kings and KFCs combined—she learned about the science of soy sauce, the manufacture of takeout containers and the connection between Jewish culture and Chinese food. Lee’s charming book combines the attitude and tone of two successful food industry–themed titles from 2007. Like Trevor Corson (The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket), she embeds her subject’s history in an entertaining personal narrative, eschewing cookie-cutter interviews and dry lists of facts and figures. Like Phoebe Damrosch (Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter), she has a breezy, likable literary demeanor that makes the first-person material engaging. Thanks to Lee’s journalistic chops, the text moves along energetically even in its more expository sections.
Tasty morsels delivered quickly and reliably.Pub Date: March 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-58007-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
A smoothly readable account of the rapid rise and fall of a tough Vietnamese gang in New York City's Chinatown. English (The Westies, 1990) follows the life and criminal career of Tinh Ngo, a Vietnamese teenager who spent two years in Thailand's squalid refugee camps before coming to the US by himself at the age of 13. Like some other young Asian males in this country, he found in a street gang a sense of belonging that he was unable to feel in a series of foster homes and menial jobs. In 1989, at 17, he joined Born to Kill (BTK), a loosely knit but dedicated group of street toughs and petty criminals presided over by 34-year-old David Thai. BTK quickly became known and feared in Chinatown for its daring and violence, if not for the competence of its individual members (in one robbery, a BTK accidentally shot and killed another member). The gang specialized in terrorizing and robbing Asian-owned massage parlors and restaurants, especially those that were hangouts for rival gangs. In August 1989, media and police attention were finally galvanized when, in broad daylight on Canal Street, Lam Trang, 19, gunned down two 15-year-old Flying Dragons who had verbally insulted Thai. As the cops began to investigate his operations, Thai ordered the bombings of police vehicles. The violence reached its peak in 1990, when a young BTK shot up a tea room and killed two members of the Ghost Shadows, who retaliated by murdering Thai's right-hand man and opening fire on the mourners at his funeral. Tinh, arrested for robbery, had become sickened by the killing and aided prosecutors in securing convictions and hefty sentences for Thai and several of his followers. (Tinh is now living under an alias in an undisclosed location.) English's highly competent examination of an ongoing social problem provides an alarming portrait of what he calls ``a brotherhood born of trauma.'' (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-12238-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
This account of the Cambridge Spy Ring is so knowledgeable and full of insight that it sweeps the competition from the field. Modin has a unique perspective. As a young man in the KGB, from 1944 until 1947, he translated, assessed, and passed on the extraordinary output of the Cambridge Five: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. From 1948 to 1951, he was their KGB controller in London. During this time he got to know Burgess, Blunt, and Cairncross well, although he didn't meet either Philby or Maclean until later, in Moscow. What makes this memoir so superior is not just Modin's firsthand knowledge but the modesty and perceptiveness of his analysis. He describes Burgess—often portrayed by others as a drunken, lecherous homosexual—as the real leader of the group, who held it together and was in fact its moral center. Blunt, who later became one of the most famous art historians of his time, had ``an uncanny ability to win the confidence'' of colleagues in British counterintelligence, who spoke to him with appalling candor about their operations. Cairncross was the first agent to notify the Soviet government of the work being done to develop the atomic bomb. But Modin's highest accolades go to Philby, whom he thinks the greatest spy of the century for the thoroughness and accuracy of his information, and to Maclean, whose political intelligence may ultimately have been even more valuable. Modin presents the five as true believers in world revolution who were nevertheless aware, and highly critical, of Soviet imperialism. They remained, Modin says, passionately in love with England. As for himself, Modin is proud of the competence with which he and his spies performed. But time has clearly eroded his respect for ideology: In closing, he describes the Cambridge Five as men who ``chose to follow the greatest illusion of all, which is politics.'' Almost certainly the best book on this subject that we are likely to see.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-21698-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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