As rich and satisfying as a chocolate cheesecake.
Once a self-confessed “chocolate ignoramus,” James Beard Award–winner Rosenblum (A Goose in Toulouse, 2000, etc.) deftly delves into the secrets of the cacao bean.
Chocolate is Michel Chaudun’s passion, his life’s work. A French fondeur with a corner store in Paris, he makes a mean mini-pavé, or a couverture-coated cube of ganache, using only the finest of ingredients and top-secret methodologies. “I think above all it is a drug,” he says of chocolate, “nicely seductive, which marks the sweet hours of our existence.” What’s not to love? Not only is chocolate healthy (despite its bad rap), with loads of antioxidants, but it contains phenylethylamine, the same excitement-inducing molecule released by the body when you’re in love. It’s so irresistible, in fact, that a recent want ad for a chocolate taster at London’s Fortnum & Mason yielded a whopping 3,000 applicants within days. Chaudun, who believes there’s only one right way to make chocolate, chastises industry behemoths like Mars and Nestlé for cutting corners in their quest for profits, resulting in a vastly inferior product. (But “purists be damned,” Rosenblum says. “Millions still revere a Hershey bar.”) At the other end of the equation, as the author shows us in this thoughtful, thorough study, are cacao-plantation workers on Africa’s Ivory Coast, plagued by civil war, corruption, and poverty, the vast majority of them having never even tasted chocolate. Rosenblum also examines the comical phenomenon of Nutella, Italy’s chocolaty goo. When he asked a friend what the attraction was, she gave “one of those ‘duh’ looks. ‘It's chocolate. Spreadable chocolate.’ ” The author makes a compelling case for chocolate’s near-aphrodisiacal qualities in a wonderful, wide-ranging, expertly written book that practically dares readers to jet off to the City of Light for a tour of its sweetshops.
As rich and satisfying as a chocolate cheesecake.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-86547-635-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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