by Kathleen Flinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 2014
A warm, quietly poignant treat.
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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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...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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