A pleasantly rendered if not earth-shattering reality check for anyone with restaurant-owning envy.
A popular food blogger and her husband open a Seattle pizzeria, testing the limits of their marriage in the process.
For years, Wizenberg (A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, 2009) has been charming readers with her blog, Orangette, an enviable world full of vintage wood, rustic tableware and beautifully photographed recipes. It was through her blog that she also found her husband, a pizza-addicted New Yorker who, upon joining her in Seattle, missed his beloved Brooklyn pizzeria, Di Fara. When he proposed that they open their own restaurant, named Delancey, the author was on board, though neither had considered how back-breakingly hard that dream was going to be. Literally building from the ground up, the couple suddenly had to contend with “shot-blasting” concrete floors, impressing health department inspectors, creating a wood-burning oven entirely from scratch, and finding a place to store 30 vinyl chairs, bought at auction from a bowling alley. Just about to run out of startup money, they eventually opened, but the troubles were hardly over—as it turns out, hiring and managing a staff also isn’t as harmonious as they’d hoped. For Wizenberg, who’d been juggling her first book launch with supporting her husband’s dream, something had to give. After a particularly contentious night, she decided that the only way to save the restaurant and her marriage was to recuse herself from the equation. As always, Wizenberg is at her best when discussing the food, and though she quickly determines how small a part of restaurant ownership that is, she still manages to sprinkle fairy dust on everything—from the homemade cold meatloaf sandwiches she makes after a hard day of construction to the Vietnamese rice noodle salad she was inspired to create after months of similar takeout lunches.
A pleasantly rendered if not earth-shattering reality check for anyone with restaurant-owning envy.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5509-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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