A personable account of hard-won success, heartening in some ways, sobering in others, and served with tasty sides.
How a Watts gang member escaped doom and ascended to the helm of a nationally acclaimed restaurant.
"The book you’re about to read,” writes Corbin in the prologue, “isn’t a gangland morality tale or a prisoner-makes-good drama or a chef memoir that paints my life as a ‘uniquely American’ success story.” However, it offers all of those elements and more. The author also presents a loving history of the Watts neighborhood; a tribute to a beloved grandmother who fed a whole community; a mouthwatering account of the evolution of Corbin's style of soul-food cooking, now featured at Alta in West Adams, Los Angeles; and a candid story about long-term drug dependency. Among the many interesting points made by this modern version of a Horatio Alger story is that for Black youth in America's poor communities, the story is not necessarily rags to riches. If you're in the drug game in your early teens (Corbin started cooking crack at 13), access to piles of cash is never a problem. Ultimately, it’s not about money; it's about social mobility. Too often, many doors lead to prison, which is where Corbin spent most of his 20s. Some of the most intriguing parts of the book are the details on the operation, genealogy, and grammar of gangs. For example, Crips will spell the word back as bacc: “No Crip sets use the letters c and k together,” writes Corbin, because that formulation, in that context, means “Crip killer.” There are two primary heroes of this story, capably preserved and shaped by James Beard Award–winning journalist Alexander: Corbin himself and his mentor, the restaurateur Daniel Patterson, whose commitment to actually doing something for Corbin—and many others coming out of incarceration and looking for direction—is rare indeed.
A personable account of hard-won success, heartening in some ways, sobering in others, and served with tasty sides.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-24382-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
A heartfelt blend of first-person journalism, oral history, travelogue, and elegy.
A personal profile of a beloved singer-songwriter.
After attending a John Prine concert in New Orleans in 2016—“He might have been an aging Mafia don, or an organizer for the longshoreman’s union, playing a Gibson jumbo guitar that looked almost as big as he was”—veteran author Piazza (City of Refuge, Devil Sent the Rain, etc.) profiled the singer-songwriter for Oxford American magazine. The article—also titled “Living in the Present With John Prine,” led to a friendship as well as a plan to produce Prine’s memoir, which was cut short when Prine died in 2020 from complications caused by Covid-19. He was 73. Piazza repurposed the materials he had gathered to produce this moving work. Equal parts profile, oral history, and on-the-road adventure, the book recounts the artist’s working-class background in suburban Chicago, his family connection to rural Kentucky, his early success with Atlantic Records, and the decision to co-found the label Oh Boy Records. Often writing in the first person and present tense, Piazza recounts his time with Prine, including a spontaneous road trip from Nashville to Sarasota, Florida, in a cherry-red 1977 Coupe de Ville. Piazza also reviews Prine’s body of work, its broad influence, and his unassuming humanity. Comparing Prine to Bob Dylan, Piazza notes, “You don’t want to be him, you just want to hang out with him.” Along the way, the author gathers insights from Prine’s peers, friends, and family. One band member, for example, notes that Prine’s keen emotional intelligence easily overcame his limitations as a musician and singer. A two-time cancer survivor, Prine was already in poor health when Piazza befriended him, but the artist’s good humor and low-key grace shine through on every page.
A heartfelt blend of first-person journalism, oral history, travelogue, and elegy.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781324050858
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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