A lovely, thoughtful book of nourishing recipes.
Lafond offers a menu of recipes to nurture body and soul in this debut cookbook.
The food we eat is not an arbitrary detail of our lives. Rather, it’s the foundation on which our lives are constructed, something that is as metaphysical as it is chemical. So believes Lafond, who writes that “to come to a place of reverence for the daily ritual of preparing and eating I had to learn to recognize what was actually occurring—a divine exchange between living things.” Her philosophy is one part conscientious food culture (eating seasonally and locally; using fresh and organic ingredients; being mindful of dietary restrictions like those regarding gluten, yeast, and candida), one part spiritual consciousness (awareness of and gratitude for the life that goes into and comes from food via the greatest of the Earth’s many cycles), and one part appreciation for complementary flavors. The book is an eclectic mix of recipes spanning the classic (potato gratin with rosemary and sharp cheddar) to the original (“full-meal-deal” Szechuan Brussels sprouts with lamb) to pure comfort food (chocolate-peanut-butter–chip cookies). Many of the dishes—like the sorrel garlic and Gruyere-stuffed tenderloin or the barbecued peach-blueberry crisp—may inspire the reader to start cooking at once. Accompanied throughout by black-and-white illustrations of stems and branches and motivational quotes, the work is both cookbook and manifesto, bidding readers to commune with their food with all the joy and earnestness of a mystic. Lafond writes with an infectious enthusiasm that keeps the pages flipping. Recipes frequently end with a brief paragraph explaining the nutritional properties of the main ingredient or tips for their use: “A good trick for keeping herbs like dill, parsley, and cilantro fresh for a week or more is to put them in a glass of water and cover it with a plastic bag to create a makeshift greenhouse.” The book espouses an open, nondenominational theism that may turn off more secular readers (it concludes with the reminder, “Let us remember that God, Source, Great Mystery, Creator, Universal Intelligence is always willing to meet every need, to fill each void, and to surrender form in order to allow new growth”), but Lafond’s attitude toward the sacredness of food is one that all cooks will be able to appreciate.
A lovely, thoughtful book of nourishing recipes.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9972175-0-6
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Greater Nourishment Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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