Warmly written, balanced but unsparing in its portraits, and culminating in a touching coda, Barr’s persuasive book...
In his debut, Travel & Leisure editor Barr revisits a pivotal moment in culinary history with a brio and attention to detail that rivals that of his subjects.
In 1970, when ardent Francophiles Julia and Paul Child, Richard Olney, M.F.K. Fisher and James Beard convened in Provence, a pantheon of American food writers inspired by all things French were to experience not only a transition in their perceptions of Gallic primacy, but the first stirrings of a revolution in American gastronomy—a revolution they helped bring into being, fired almost as much by contentiousness as amity. Barr, Fisher’s great-nephew, reveals how these encounters within a rather insular coterie happened more or less by accident but at an incendiary time, when American attitudes toward its own culture were alight with change. The author also demonstrates how these writers, challenging themselves to temper nostalgia and embrace new ideas, opened a door to a seductive philosophy of simple pleasures that led directly to today’s pervasive “foodie” ethic: cooking as a practical but rewarding art form. Their respective cookbooks and Child’s immensely popular TV show encouraged Americans to celebrate their gustatory diversity, gravitate to fresh and organic ingredients, learn more sophisticated but accessible techniques, and enjoy a growing sense of liberation from old ways—even autocratic French ones. Barr chronicles this demystification process by focusing on how this group of strong personalities reacted to a fortuitous point in time. He does so in such an immediate, inviting way that one feels a member of the party, privy to the conversations, the meals, the generous gestures and corrosive rivalries. The author’s most invaluable resource was a 1970 journal kept by Fisher, who emerges as the linchpin of the book.
Warmly written, balanced but unsparing in its portraits, and culminating in a touching coda, Barr’s persuasive book overcomes the occasional longueur to offer an enhanced appreciation of some groundbreaking cooks and their acolytes.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-71834-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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