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
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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