In her debut cookbook, the author offers recipes and tips on preparing international dishes for family meals. Resele serves up a variety of inviting recipes, attractively packaged, in a volume that draws on a wide range of flavors, including both common (rosemary, thyme and balsamic vinegar) and less well-known items (kaffir leaves, galangal root and flax seed powder). Her cookbook is also diverse in other ways: It draws on her multicultural Indochinese-Japanese-Chinese heritage; her experience as a chef; and her training in biochemistry and nutrition. After some opening material, the book moves on to recipes that focus first on breakfast, then lunch, dinner or supper, followed by main courses, and then switching organizational principles with chapters on carbs, vegetables and desserts. Each recipe has an introduction and a nutritional analysis, and the book includes references and a glossary. Unfortunately, however, it has no index, and readers should be prepared for weights in grams. Recipes include standards—like Gazpacho, Polenta, and Baked Apples—as well as some interesting variations, like Kimchi made with spinach or arugula leaves. The range of cuisines shows up in the inclusion of dishes as varied as Fresh Egg Spaetzle, Ayam Rica-Rica, Miso Udon Soup, Beef Bulgogi, Tortellini Filling and Tortilla Tempeh Crumble. As appealing as some of these foods may be, errors at times undermine the credibility of the material. Contrary to the text, Plato did not write Epigram VII to (the mythological) Helen of Troy and may not have written it at all. Not only is Marie Antoinette not responsible for causing the French Revolution, as the book asserts, but she did not say “Let them eat cake” at all, let alone in October 1793. The most questionable statement about nutrition is that “a low carbohydrate diet has a negative effect on muscle building and the proper burning of fat,” an assertion at odds with studies that have shown that—given sufficient calories—people on low-carb diets either maintained or increased lean body mass, losing only body fat. The book also reflects editing lapses in its references to “corned” pomegranates and “gloves” of garlic, which could easily have been avoided. Well-seasoned recipes served up with prose that readers need to take with a pinch of salt.
Pub Date: June 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490561882
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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