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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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