A moving book that highlights a long-gone world.
Cooking instructor and cookbook author Kitty Morse tells of discovering her great-grandparents’ memories and recipes in this history-filled cookbook.
The author was born in Casablanca, Morocco, shortly after World War II to a British aviation officer and a French administrative assistant. She knew that her maternal grandfather—her warm, gregarious pépé, Armand Darmon—came from an Algerian Sephardic family, but she knew little of her reserved, French-born mémé, Suzanne. It wasn’t until decades later, while cleaning out her deceased mother’s Oceanside, California, home, that the author came across a suitcase bearing a trove of documents bearing the mysterious title Les Archives Complètes des Familles Lévy-Neymarck. These documents told the story of her mémé’s parents—a secular Jewish doctor and his wife living in Châlons-sur-Marne at the time of the Nazi occupation. They include Dr. Prosper Lévy’s wartime diary and his wife Blanche Neymarck’s book of recipes. It was a bittersweet discovery, indeed: sweet because the author has written several cookbooks, and bitter because neither of her great-grandparents survived the occupation. With this archive, she effectively opens a window onto life in France before and during the war, elegantly tracing the familiar connections between love, grief, and food. It’s a project that was begun by her mother, Nicole,who transcribed some of the documents without ever mentioning their existence to the author: “I’d never understood what lay behind the intermittent bouts of depression that plagued my mother throughout her life,” Morse writes. “How I wished she’d shared Les Archives…with me, as difficult as that might have been.” Prosper’s diary covers the first year of the occupation, after which poor health prevented him from writing further; Blanche’s recipes are a mix of French and Alsatian dishes, from hearty stews and casseroles to wine-heavy preparations of duck, chicken, and fish. The desserts and baked goods section is the most extensive and alluring part of the book—featuring “Beignets de Carnaval” and “Alsatian Brioche”—but the entire work is richly illustrated with the author’s husband Owen Morse’s full-color photographs.
A moving book that highlights a long-gone world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780578361642
Page Count: 210
Publisher: La Caravane Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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