Readers will lap up this mouthwatering memoir and hungrily await a sequel.
A beloved food writer recalls her youth through the lens of cuisine.
Jaffrey (Market Days, 1995, etc.) grew up in India during the 1930s and ’40s, the fifth child of two doting, well-heeled parents. Her family was Hindu, but embraced certain touches of Muslim culture: The women wore both the loose culottes favored by Muslims and long, traditional Hindu skirts; at school, Jaffrey studied alongside both Muslim and Hindu children. Her story has no clear narrative arc and no tension that requires resolution, but the meandering is pleasant. Almost every vignette includes a description of food. When she was born, her grandmother spelled out the word Om in honey on her tongue, and Jaffrey’s first name translates to “Sweet as Honey.” Summer afternoon thirsts were slaked with fresh lemonade or a mixture of fruit syrup and water. Monsoon season brought its own sweet treats of chilled mango juice and “pretzel-shaped jabelis” dipped in milk. A long bout of chicken pox was made bearable by her grandmother’s chutney. Even Partition had culinary consequences: Hindus who headed into India from what became West Pakistan introduced Delhi to Punjabi food, including the terrific paneer dishes and tasty tandoori specialties that are now staples of Indian restaurants. Punjabis also loved dairy products; they made the richest yogurt, and the creamiest lassi, a cool yogurt beverage. As an adult, Jaffrey went to college and then moved to England to study drama. Not until she landed in London did she really begin to appreciate her mother’s cooking. She wrote home, begging for instruction on preparing the delicacies of her youth, and soon airmail letters thick with recipes began to arrive. Fifty pages of those recipes round out the text.
Readers will lap up this mouthwatering memoir and hungrily await a sequel.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4295-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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