An award-winning nonfiction writer and journalist’s recipe-packed memoir of her Midwestern childhood and how she came “to [her] love of the kitchen.”
Even before Flinn (The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks, 2011, etc.) was born, cooking defined her family. In the late 1950s, her parents left Michigan to help her Irish uncle run an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. When they returned a short time later to care for her father’s dying sister, they went to live on a run-down farm. The family lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and the Flinn children “never had new clothes, fancy bikes, or enough money for hot lunch at school.” However, between the chickens they raised and fruits and vegetables they grew, the Flinns never lacked for good food. In fact, cooking was the conduit through which previous generations of her working-class family expressed their love for each other. Her maternal grandfather courted her grandmother “not with flowers but with food,” and Flinn’s paternal grandmother kept her children from starving during the Depression with the soups she made from just about anything she could find. When the author’s parents married, her father took his new wife on a fishing honeymoon. After the family’s finances improved, they indulged in the more expensive convenience foods more prosperous families took for granted. Longing for homemade food, Flinn began to experiment in the kitchen and discovered “there was nothing better than feeding people.” Cooking eventually became the way she could forget her status as a social outcast and bond with her dying father when the family moved to Florida. As a young adult, Flinn aspired to attend her culinary idol Julia Child’s alma mater, Le Cordon Bleu. More than a decade later, following along the well-worn path of a family love affair with food, she lived out her dream.
A warm, quietly poignant treat.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01544-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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