A delicious offering warmed with sentiment and topped with humor.
A fourth cookbook from food enthusiast Celenza.
There is guaranteed to be something for almost everyone in this 430-page cookbook with a cornucopia of recipes. In addition to a generous helping of breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and casserole recipes, there are over three dozen complete dinner menus that are organized into seasonal categories. Also included are sections on grilling, dressings, sauces, gravies and dips. There's an informative chapter on cheeses, listing a variety from 14 different countries with a description of their flavor, texture and how they are best served and used. (The author states that a staggering 650 different types of cheeses have been documented.) Some recipes are accompanied by bits of the author's history, amusing food-related anecdotes and/or helpful hints as to cooking techniques, presentation and serving suggestions. The author's warmth is palpable; readers will feel like they’re being instructed by an old friend. In addition, Celenza includes healthier alternative ingredients for many of the recipes. Interspersed are photographs of the author's family and friends breaking bread together at various occasions, as well as a sprinkling of charming black and white drawings and simple graphics. There are a handful of color photographs of varying quality of some of the completed dishes. The recipes are well-written, concise and easy to follow, and Celenza takes care to include details and extra “finishing touches.” Other helpful sections include a listing of necessary cooking utensils, refrigerator and pantry stock suggestions, baking equivalents and measurements. Celenza good-humoredly advises her reader to check on the freshness of their pantry and refrigerator stock: “...And we haven't even touched upon the freezer. The snow on some of those packages has formed an arctic tundra.” Celenza's love of tradition, food and family and their inextricable links to each other is evident as is her delight in creating something special to share with others.
A delicious offering warmed with sentiment and topped with humor.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0979195334
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Marion O. Celenza
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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