A collection of recipes that are as fresh and delicious as vegetables pulled directly from the garden.
Thompson, a certified integrative nutrition health coach and stay-at-home mom, offers a garden-to-table cookbook that celebrates the art of the homemade meal.
The author notes that, long ago, her Italian grandparents would send her father outside to pick dandelions for dinner; similarly, she involves her own children in the growing, harvesting, and cooking of their family meals. In this vibrant cookbook, she shares tried and true family recipes that focus on herbs and vegetables from her garden. After she discovered that most members of her family suffered from gluten intolerances, she started to explore cuisines from other cultures; as a result, all of the recipes here may be made gluten free. Readers should note, however, that some don’t include serving sizes, as the author says that she’s accustomed to adjusting the ingredients based on the size of the group for which she’s cooking. It’s obvious when reading the recipes how she got her nickname, the “Pepper Queen,” as she has a clear penchant for hot peppers, and readers who enjoy spicy food will get a lot out of this book. It also features tips that even advanced cooks may find helpful; for example, she shares her personal salt-mix recipe (three parts gray sea salt and one part Himalayan pink salt) as well as a simple note to store rice in the refrigerator. Her recipes focus on the quality of their fresh ingredients rather than on their quantity, and although she mentions many specific brands, she notes that she hasn’t received compensation from any of them; they’re simply her favorites. High-quality color photographs by the author accompany the text, including images of vegetable blossoms. Thompson also includes a list of resources that include where to procure some of the more obscure brands in the text.
A collection of recipes that are as fresh and delicious as vegetables pulled directly from the garden.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982228-66-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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