by Jennifer Klinec ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017
An unexpectedly moving memoir.
A Canadian-born entrepreneur recounts how she went to Iran in search of culinary adventure and fell in love.
Klinec was the child of immigrant “striver” parents “for whom money and gain meant everything.” Wealth accumulated through an automotive manufacturing business transformed the love her mother and father had for her and her sister into “benevolent neglect.” Her parents granted Klinec an extraordinary amount of freedom, which, as a teenager, she used to enroll in schools in Switzerland and Ireland and travel all over Europe. While “the sense of motion…thrilled [her],” by the time she was 17, the author also found that she loved cooking. After attending university, she moved to London, where she went to work for an investment banking firm. But the financial security so important to her parents was not enough for her. In her early 30s, she left the corporate world to start her own artisanal foods cooking school, which she ran from her apartment. Fascinated by Middle Eastern culture and food, Klinec decided to go to Iran to find recipes. Less than 24 hours after she arrived in Tehran, a man named Vahid, whose “ ‘hello’ was more of a bark than a greeting,” approached her to practice his English. Vahid introduced Klinec to his mother, and the two women bonded as they prepared food together in the family kitchen. At the same time, the author fell in love with Vahid. Together, they sought out a mullah who would grant them status as “temporary” husband and wife and thus protect them from harsh Islamic laws against adultery. “Our relationship [was] stitched together out of fragments of devotion, strong will and despair,” she writes. Yet in the end, they found belonging—and emotional nourishment—in exile. By turns unsentimental and tender, Klinec’s book offers insight into the delicious world of Persian cuisine as well as the surprising twists and turns of the human heart.
An unexpectedly moving memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1455537693
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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
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