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 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
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