Paced as superbly as a seven-course meal, able to engage the heart and the memory as well as the taste buds.
British cookbook author Slater takes an engrossing, revealing look back at his 1960s childhood through the foods that filled his family’s kitchen.
As his popular Observer columns often remind readers, food can do more than fill the stomach; it can touch the soul. Slater’s mother didn't see it that way, though. For her, cooking was no more satisfying than tending to Aunt Fannie’s incontinence. Mum’s burnt toast, soupy rice pudding, and rock-hard Christmas cake were staples at the dinner table, but she tried very hard, “desperate to be a homemaker,” and her son loved her all the more for it. Dad, a gruff, strict, terrifying disciplinarian, was incapable of such devotion. When his mother died of complications from asthma, his father’s eye wandered to Mrs. Potter, the new housekeeper and cook extraordinaire. Slater, approaching his teens, grew angry and lonely. He was also sexually confused: trying on his mother's clothes, enduring Uncle Geoff’s perverted game of Find the Sixpence, and masturbating to the cookery pages of Woman’s World. Eventually, Slater turned to cooking as a respite and a way of competing with Mrs. Potter for his father’s attention. After his father’s death, he attended culinary school and worked at a luxurious château staffed by a bunch of sex-crazed longhairs like himself. While structuring a memoir around foodstuffs might be ham-handed in the hands of lesser food scribes, here it proves to be a perfectly natural way to tell the story. Convincing, engaging, and rich with detail, Slater’s prose lets readers taste the pink marshmallows, smell the freshly baked oat cookies, and feel the crunch of the green beans.
Paced as superbly as a seven-course meal, able to engage the heart and the memory as well as the taste buds.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 1-592-40090-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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