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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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