An intimate, revealing portrait, far different from the woman blazoned in the tabloids.
In an absorbing memoir, Lakshmi (Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day, 2007, etc.), host of Top Chef, cookbook author, fashion columnist, and coveted supermodel, focuses more on love and many wrenching losses than on glamour and glitter.
Born in India, Lakshmi came to the United States when she was 4, flying alone to New York to join her mother. Although struggling financially, her mother, who reminded her that “beauty is not an accomplishment,” always managed to send the author back to India each summer, where she lived with her doting grandparents. Her family, their culture, and especially the food they shared (the book includes a few recipes) were crucial to her identity. Encouraged to work hard in school, she majored in theater arts at Clark University but had no clear career goals. She never thought she was particularly beautiful, and growing up in the U.S., she came to believe that “lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self.” Modeling happened by accident, during a stay in Europe, but once launched, Lakshmi found great success. In Europe, she embarked, also, on the first of several important relationships. The author realizes she always sought “a mentor, an older, wiser man” to make up for the absence of her own father, but it seems she was also attracted to wealth and power. Her European lover was urbane, cultivated, and rich. Later, she married Salman Rushdie, but they divorced after several rocky years. Lakshmi was intent on pursuing her TV career, while Rushdie expected her presence as he traveled the world as a literary star. Health issues also interfered: diagnosed with endometriosis, she required several surgeries during which Rushdie, self-absorbed, offered little support. Two men—a billionaire financier and philanthropist and a venture capitalist—came into her life later, one fathering her daughter.
An intimate, revealing portrait, far different from the woman blazoned in the tabloids.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-220261-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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