A jolly good memoir, served with savoir-faire.
Disarmingly bright memoir from a clever food critic.
Currently a New York Observer columnist, Hodgson was born after World War II to a British Foreign Service officer and his elegant wife. Due to her father’s diverse postings, the author advanced from an English childhood ingesting food laced with suet to swimming in the Suez with the international set. She lived in Beirut and Stockholm, prewar Vietnam and postwar Berlin, tasting all the local fare. Leaving public school in Dorset, the tall teenager sailed to New York on the Queen Mary. Since her father worked at the United Nations, Hodgson became a UN guide, part of a convivial multinational circle. Episodes like being flung onto the Persian carpet by an amorous Iranian diplomat hastened the pretty young Englishwoman’s coming of age. She acquired boyfriends, took ballet classes and waited tables in Greenwich Village. Instead of toad-in-the-hole, she ate oysters; tajine and couscous replaced bangers and Marmite. During the ’70s, she led a bohemian life in Paris and Mexico, dallying with handsome dancer Claudio and sustaining a long-term relationship with poet William. (No surname is provided, but readers will have no difficulty identifying that Pulitzer Prize winner). Hodgson’s occasional recollections of memorable meals generally lead to anecdotes. She intersperses recipes like cloves in a ham, but her stories of exotic places and curious people provide at least as much entertainment as the tasty dishes. Pertinent comments assess the craft of a culinary critic and the food foibles of the famous. (When poet W.H. Auden woke up in the middle of the night, for example, he “liked to console himself with a cold spud.”) The author sweetly and smartly depicts her family and renders all her adventures with real descriptive power and an ear for language.
A jolly good memoir, served with savoir-faire.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1270-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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