A warm story of a life buoyed by resilience, determination, love of family, and food.
A famous chef recalls her adventures in cooking.
Restaurateur, cookbook author, and TV host Bastianich (Lidia’s Celebrate Like an Italian: 220 Foolproof Recipes that Make Every Meal a Party, 2017, etc.) offers an ebullient, nostalgic memoir of her journey to success. Her love for food began in her grandmother’s capacious garden in Busoler, a small village in northern Italy. In 1947, just months after she was born, the region became part of communist Yugoslavia; although rural Busoler saw few effects, her family’s life in the city of Pola changed dramatically. Censorship, repression, and an atmosphere of fear came to a head when her father was suddenly arrested and detained for 30 days. In 1958, her parents decided it was time for the family to escape: first her mother, the author, and her older brother obtained papers for a trip to Trieste, where her mother’s sister lived; a few weeks later, her father arrived after making the perilous border crossing on foot. For the next two years, the family lived in a refugee camp, in barely rudimentary barracks, existing on rationed food. Bastianich was allowed to enroll in a nearby Catholic school, where she helped out in the kitchen: “a culinary transition point,” she writes, because she learned to cook in volume. With astonishingly generous support from Catholic Relief Services, the Red Cross, and Catholic Charities, the family was able to fulfill their dream of settling in America. There, her mother’s home cooking was supplemented by the bounties of American cuisine: “Spam, American cheese, and Wonder Bread were our favorites,” the author gleefully admits. As a teenager, jobs in food service taught her about different recipes and cooks’ techniques. Soon after marrying, she and her husband decided to open an Italian restaurant in Queens, which proved greatly popular. In 1981, they launched a swankier restaurant in Manhattan, earning accolades from food critics and patrons such as Julia Child and James Beard.
A warm story of a life buoyed by resilience, determination, love of family, and food.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3161-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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