Shapiro has, in a brief book, made her subject truly come alive.
Shapiro (Something from the Oven, 2004) offers a vivid biography of the 20th century’s leading gourmand.
Food wasn’t very important to Julia Child when she was young. She grew up in California, eating the bland New England cuisine that her Massachusetts-born mother instructed the future chef to prepare. After attending Smith College, she meandered through the next decade, single, without a real career. In 1946, in part because she was trying to make herself more attractive to the man she would eventually marry, she took a cooking class. Child was not, Shapiro makes clear, a born chef: In the early days, chickens were blackened to a crisp; a duck exploded; béarnaise sauce congealed; brains dissolved into mush. As a new bride in France, floundering around for something meaningful to do, Child enrolled in more classes, this time at the Cordon Bleu. There, she learned to cook “with all her senses engaged . . . with a visceral understanding of raw ingredients.” A career—teaching Americans how to cook—was born. Why was she so successful on TV, in an era when cooking shows weren’t very popular? Because, says Shapiro, Child had no artifice. She was herself on television. She was also fabulously composed in the face of on-air kitchen disasters—as when a tarte tartin collapsed in a heap. Her informal charm and humor helped her accomplish one of her central goals—to demystify French cuisine, and convince Americans that they could, to borrow the title of her most famous book, master the art of French cooking. In Shapiro’s hands, Child emerges as a steadfast, vigorous, analytical person.
Shapiro has, in a brief book, made her subject truly come alive.Pub Date: April 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03839-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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