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ALL OR NOTHING

Name: ALL OR NOTHING
Author: Jesse Schenker
ISBN: 978-0062339300

ONE CHEF'S APPETITE FOR THE EXTREME

by Jesse Schenker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2014

Schenker’s candid memoir chronicles the painful journey of a man striving for both culinary perfection and inner peace.

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An award-winning chef reveals his addictions.

Schenker, owner of Recette, in New York’s West Village, and the newly opened The Gander, loved to cook even as a child. Hyperactive and rebellious, working in his family’s kitchen alongside his beloved grandmother offered him “an outlet for all of the emotions that were too uncomfortable for me to really feel.” But cooking did not save him from drugs: marijuana first and then opiates, heroin and crack. “If you use crack,” he writes, “it will eventually own you. I found it so addictive that I dreamed about getting high while I slept.” Schenker became expert at lying, stealing and manipulating his distraught parents. When a psychologist warned his parents that his marijuana use was “a harbinger of bad things to come,” his protests and tears convinced them that it was just a phase. “No one was better at faking remorse than me,” he writes. “I learned that I could get away with anything.” As he plummeted into addiction—once even stealing his mother’s Rolex for drug money—he held down a succession of jobs as a cook. After he hit bottom and his parents finally cut him off, he landed in jail, soon getting himself assigned to the kitchen. Jail, halfway houses and Alcoholics Anonymous inspired his mantra: “Your serenity is in direct proportion to your acceptance.” For several years, he worked in local restaurants and then was hired by Gordon Ramsay, whose kitchen was run “like a military operation.” Schenker longed to go out on his own, and Recette Private Dining was his first venture, serving a 10-course tasting menu for a small group of diners. A real restaurant soon followed. His manic striving for success, however, led to his substituting one addiction for another, as he became an obsessive workaholic, suffering extreme anxiety and panic attacks.

Schenker’s candid memoir chronicles the painful journey of a man striving for both culinary perfection and inner peace.

Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014

ISBN: 978-0062339300

Page Count: 272

Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)