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
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 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
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