A culinary-minded journalist reckons with the loss of her sense of smell.
After graduating from college, 22-year-old Birnbaum decided to change course and pursue her passion for cooking as a vocation. Little did she know that her life’s direction was to change yet again that summer. Just weeks before she was to start at the Culinary Institute of America, the author was hit by a car, an accident that broke her pelvis in two spots, snapped the tendons in her knee, fractured her skull and, most devastatingly for the author, obliterated her sense of smell. After a month, when she was utterly unmoved in the face of a freshly baked apple crisp, Birnbaum realized the gravity of her situation. In her debut, the author attempts to come to terms with life after her trauma. She movingly depicts the nearly ineffable plight of the anosmic, both from her perspective—“without smell, the world around me seemed suddenly strange and stagnant. […] How do you describe the scent of nothing? I wondered. It was strong; it was blank. It was completely overwhelming”—and that of others she encountered in researching the condition’s various forms. Ever hopeful that her sense would return and eager to understand the roots of her malady—the impact’s force had severed the olfactory neurons connecting nose to brain—Birnbaum consulted with Oliver Sacks, numerous olfactory specialists and even a flavorist and perfumers. Her story includes probing introspection, especially as smell relates to emotion, alongside passages of sweeping journalistic discovery of all things olfactory. A brave, unflagging memoir.
Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-191531-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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