Riley (Anaãs: The Erotic Life of Anaãs Nin, 1993, etc.) offers a loving, overstuffed biography of the cook from Pasadena who introduced French cooking to the American kitchen. Julia McWilliams, a leggy California girl, was an adventurous child with a huge appetite who rarely strayed into the kitchen. Equally adventurous as a young woman, and bored with her career in advertising, she joined the OSS. In 1944, while in Asia, she met the dashing Paul Child, an OSS officer and artist with a love of women, food, and poetry. After a rocky start, the two fell passionately in love. Paul introduced Julia to the pleasures of the table, and she became fascinated with food and its preparation. When Paul's new role as an American cultural attachÇ took them to Paris after the war, Julia began cooking in earnest, even attending the famed Cordon Bleu school, where she wedded her American enthusiasm and sense of fun to the serious world of the gourmand. In Paris she met her lifelong collaborator, Simone (``Simca'') Beck. The two set out to create a cookbook. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, proved to be an immediate success. American cooks used it to escape the tyranny of frozen foods and grew to appreciate Childs's reliance on good food, not food snobbery. With her husband watching proudly from the wings, she went on to do television shows. Audiences loved her quick wit, her vibrant voice, and her slightly awkward presence in the kitchen—she was famous for getting splattered. While Riley's book is short on recipes, her details are exquisite: Julia and Paul's defense of a friend accused of communism in 1955, despite the threat to Paul's career; Julia telling her lonely sister to ``get a diaphragm and move to Paris to complete your education''; and Paul's gorgeous love letters to Julia. An exhaustively researched, charming story of a life well lived, and an admiring portrait of a good marriage.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48335-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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