Affectionate, passionate and informative, but lacks the deep reflection of the finest memoir.
A senior editor at Knopf reflects on her long love affair with food and cooking, with friends and family—and with writing about them all.
Jones has had a distinguished editing career. Early on, she urged Doubleday, her employer at the time, to publish The Diary of a Young Girl by unknown Anne Frank; at Knopf, she introduced the world to cooking mavens Julia Child, Claudia Roden and Marion Cunningham among others. Jones begins her memoir at home (her mother hated garlic), then moves gracefully forward, recounting an early trip to Paris that revealed to her the glories of cooking and eating. She soon met and married her husband of nearly 50 years, Evan Jones, who grew to share her passions. Many of the most tender moments in this most tender of narratives involve their elegant choreography in the kitchen. The author would eventually meet and befriend the world’s most celebrated cooks and bakers (James Beard appears here regularly), and she soared to a spectacular career. Of course, there were problems and failures and losses: She recommended a series of cookbooks that bombed; she struggled with the sometimes cantankerous writers (including a contretemps with Marcella Hazan concerning yeast); she lost her husband in 1996 and faced for the first time in a half century a lonely kitchen—but not for long, as her vivacious grand-niece soon appeared. Jones offers some insider’s detail—Beard kneaded bread with one hand; beaver tail is tough to penetrate—and appends a wonderfully eclectic list of recipes (brains with a mustard coating, anyone?), but it’s regrettable that she does not always prepare her sentences as well as her sweetbreads. Clichés (“fell on deaf ears,” “tough nut to crack,” “crowning moment”) appear with alarming regularity throughout and affect her prose in the way a single bad egg affects an otherwise fabulous omelet.
Affectionate, passionate and informative, but lacks the deep reflection of the finest memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-26495-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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
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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