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 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
