Mosler’s lively and accessible writing style joyfully captures the satisfaction gained by trusting your instincts and...
Building on the success of her blog, Taxi Gourmet, Mosler recounts the story of her transcontinental search for a vocation, which propelled the author into dancing in tango clubs in Buenos Aires, becoming a cab driver in New York City, and falling in love with the city of Berlin.
Initially, the author’s love of food led her to believe her destiny involved running a restaurant. But while working on the line at a San Francisco French-Asian fusion restaurant, Mosler faced the fact that her competence in the kitchen wasn’t up to the requirements of her dream job. Yet as her friends began settling down and buying homes, Mosler embarked on a different track. The author departed for Buenos Aires, intent on writing about food from a different perspective while indulging her love of Latin dance, especially the tango. After a disastrous night on the dance floor, Mosler flagged down one of the thousands of taxis trolling the city and requested the driver take her to his favorite restaurant. At first, her desire sprang from a growling stomach and the embarrassing tango episode. However, following the charming gustatory experience, Mosler pondered the idea of repeating the experience: “What if I hopped into a random cab every week and asked the taxista to take me to his favorite place to eat?” Soon, the author was blogging about her taxi-culinary adventures for family and friends, and her ask-the-driver technique provided her with a unique route into the life of the city, its foodways, and its people. Mosler delightfully conveys her nervousness and other feelings she experienced during her excursions—e.g., during the first days of driving her own cab or her surprise at the success of her Kickstarter campaign funding her move to Berlin.
Mosler’s lively and accessible writing style joyfully captures the satisfaction gained by trusting your instincts and seeking out new places, food, and people.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87031-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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