An engaging family portrait enriched by an insider’s view of the Chinese kitchen.
A Chinese-American daughter recalls the kitchen and its chores as a safe haven from the tensions within a family trying to assimilate while maintaining traditional values.
It’s not news that ethnic cooking forges a vital link to one’s cultural heritage in the turmoil of the American melting pot. But Li (Bittersweet: A Novel, 1992), whose paternal grandfather was the first elected president of Nationalist China, conveys surprising depth of feeling in her description of food’s impact on her upbringing. Though she begins with a somewhat self-absorbed series of girlhood recollections, the narrative quickly picks up steam with the arrival from China of her grandmother to put at least the culinary side of the house in order. Watching the aging Nai-nai sharpen her cleaver “with the single-mindedness of an axe murderer” on the flagstone porch of their suburban north Bronx home or dodging traffic to access the vegetable garden she has installed on the median of a nearby expressway, the author begins to plumb the relationship of food preparation to the integrity of a Chinese household. Knowledge is imparted with every meal. The painstaking shaping and even tinting of New Year’s holiday bread to resemble a peach, for example, evokes that fruit’s connotation of longevity, although the fiercely pragmatic Nai-nai suggests that eating the peach itself would probably be better for the teeth. Authentic recipes from Nai-nai and others appear at the end of most chapters. Some seem at first starkly minimalist, but American cooks who think they know their way around a wok may find themselves realizing they’ve never tried it exactly that way. (One surprisingly recurrent ingredient: brown sugar.) It’s an unusual format, but the author artfully blends episodes of gastronomic education with often poignant recollections of a stern father who could never quite bridge the cultural divide between himself and an essentially American daughter.
An engaging family portrait enriched by an insider’s view of the Chinese kitchen.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-768-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.
Four decades after Watergate shook America, journalist Woodward (The Price of Politics, 2012, etc.) returns to the scandal to profile Alexander Butterfield, the Richard Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the Oval Office tapes and effectively toppled the presidency.
Of all the candidates to work in the White House, Butterfield was a bizarre choice. He was an Air Force colonel and wanted to serve in Vietnam. By happenstance, his colleague H.R. Haldeman helped Butterfield land a job in the Nixon administration. For three years, Butterfield worked closely with the president, taking on high-level tasks and even supervising the installation of Nixon’s infamous recording system. The writing here is pure Woodward: a visual, dialogue-heavy, blow-by-blow account of Butterfield’s tenure. The author uses his long interviews with Butterfield to re-create detailed scenes, which reveal the petty power plays of America’s most powerful men. Yet the book is a surprisingly funny read. Butterfield is passive, sensitive, and dutiful, the very opposite of Nixon, who lets loose a constant stream of curses, insults, and nonsensical bluster. Years later, Butterfield seems conflicted about his role in such an eccentric presidency. “I’m not trying to be a Boy Scout and tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do,” Butterfield concedes. It is curious to see Woodward revisit an affair that now feels distantly historical, but the author does his best to make the story feel urgent and suspenseful. When Butterfield admitted to the Senate Select Committee that he knew about the listening devices, he felt its significance. “It seemed to Butterfield there was absolute silence and no one moved,” writes Woodward. “They were still and quiet as if they were witnessing a hinge of history slowly swinging open….It was as if a bare 10,000 volt cable was running through the room, and suddenly everyone touched it at once.”
Less a sequel than an addendum, the book offers a close-up view of the Oval Office in its darkest hour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1644-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
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