A literary meal both luscious and lively—and essential to understanding our vacillating love affair with the French.
A thoroughly researched account of how Americans fell in and out of love with French cuisine and cooking.
Cultural historian Spring (Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, 2011, etc.) returns with a stunning account of six eclectic, electric personalities, a group of Americans who helped popularize French cooking in America in the middle of the 20th century. Some are names that even the most casual cook knows (Julia Child, Alice B. Toklas), but others will be recognizable mostly to oenophiles or those who know a bit of kitchen custom and/or history (M.F.K. Fisher, Alexis Lichine, A.J. Liebling, Richard Olney). Throughout, the author combines biography and cultural history. He tells us the relevant pieces of his principals’ biographies—focusing, of course, on their gastronomical work—and how each affected the swelling interest in all things French. He also credits numerous others, including John F. and Jackie Kennedy, for influencing public opinion. Although Spring is mostly generous in his assessments, he does do some occasional slicing, especially on Fisher, whom he basically calls a liar—though he recognizes that her artful lying was a form of storytelling. It is fascinating to read how these six figures discovered French food, wine, and cooking and how each developed a specialty and then brought that knowledge to a public eager to read about it all—or, in the case of Child, who had a long-running show on PBS, to see it on TV. Spring also discusses the deaths of each of his subjects, their legacies, and the ultimate implosion of the fascination with French culture, brought on largely by the turmoil of the late 1960s, both in the U.S. and France.
A literary meal both luscious and lively—and essential to understanding our vacillating love affair with the French.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-10315-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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