Too much sugar, not enough salt.
A salmagundi of memoir, cookbook and self-help bromides by New York Times food writer Severson.
Gradually delineating her many troubled years, the author writes about how she recognized and accepted her lesbianism, struggled with alcohol and substance abuse, survived fractured love affairs and coped with feelings of personal insufficiency. She made transformative job changes—from Alaska to San Francisco to New York—and tried to understand her ambivalence toward her own family, a complex attitude that ignites some of her somewhat sophomoric epiphanies near the end of the book. Severson punctuates her journey with stops to reflect on some iconic cooks who influenced her. “My heroes,” she writes, “are women who never abandoned the kitchen. They use cooking as a source of strength.” Each segment ends with a relevant recipe. Among the notables she visits, and reveres, are Marion Cunningham and Alice Waters (in the Bay Area), Ruth Reichl (New York), Leah Chase (New Orleans), Edna Lewis (Atlanta) and—perhaps surprisingly—Rachael Ray (“I mean, who doesn’t like to feel a little close to a celebrity?”). Severson begins and ends with her mother, who emerges as a lodestar as the text progresses. Throughout, the author is a fiery advocate for the importance of home cooking and family meals. Cooking for, and with, those you love, she writes, is one of life’s great pleasures. The recipes range from gumbo to sour cornbread. Though Severson characterizes herself as a hard worker, she did not work hard enough on her diction, which leaps back and forth from cliché (“a New York minute”) to treacly Wayne Dyer–isms (“The most valuable thing I have is who I am”).
Too much sugar, not enough salt.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-757-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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 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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