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HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING

Some won’t easily give up the pleasures of working from a recipe on the printed page. But for gourmets who value efficiency...

The iPhone, it turns out, is an ideal medium for cooking from recipes—or, perhaps, Culinate, the creators of this app, found an ideal source for iPhone cookery in New York Times food columnist Bittman’s 1,046-page original.

Some won’t easily give up the pleasures of working from a recipe on the printed page. But for gourmets who value efficiency and their time more than the need to sustain the printing industry, this is a near perfect app, awesome in its comprehensiveness, elegant organization, ease of use and lightning-fast operation. The search-and-filter function makes it easy to find recipes based on styles, ingredients and modes of preparation, but browsing with no destination recipe in mind is surprisingly pleasing in this format, as well. Bittman uses a four-letter code (FMVE) to signify whether the recipes are Fast, require to be Made ahead, are Vegetarian or Essential to the culinary canon, and you can use any of these as a filter on the search page—useful when looking for, say, a vegetarian dish that can be made in 30 minutes. All recipes are divided into steps, and each step is given its own screen. Steps that require careful timing link to a pop-up timer preset to go off for the mentioned number of minutes in the recipe. You can add ingredients from a recipe to an editable shopping list, which can also be shared via e-mail. If you like a recipe, you can note it on Facebook or Twitter, or you can rate it and your vote will register on other uses’ phones. All this is in addition to the clearly written, near-encyclopedic array of articles that instruct cooks of all abilities in how to cook practically anything.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Wiley

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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