A scrumptious pairing of nourishment and familial devotion.
A mother and her two adult daughters explore their unified histories through themes of food, hard work and love.
Best-selling cookbook author and former Cook’s Illustrated executive editor Anderson (Cook without a Book: Meatless Meals, 2011, etc.) grew up in a household “where food was revered and big meals were the main event,” so she naturally passed that devotion down to daughters Maggy and Sharon. All three co-author the food blog Three Many Cooks, and each describes intimate and distinctive experiences growing up in the kitchen-friendly Anderson clan and within their own extended families. A constant commonality for the trio is the timeless enjoyment of generational go-to recipes (Perfect Carrot Cake, Cheese Drawer Mac and Cheese, Pasta Carbonara, etc.). With equal heft, Anderson extolls the joys and pains of working motherhood and her evolution through the echelons of food editorship, while her daughters exuberantly share the “tragicomedy of our sisterhood” and their Christianity, related through pages of warm anecdotes. All three women exhibit charismatic, affable personalities. Anderson, raised in the Bible Belt by a doting mother and a recovering-alcoholic father, shares her father’s recipe for Lemon Chicken, a dish he savored up until and throughout his elderly convalescence. Firstborn daughter Maggy, after marrying, living abroad and returning stateside, revels in her eventual appreciation for the “power of food” and a passion for cooking through her mother’s long-held family traditions and talent for “conceptualizing a meal.” Youngest daughter Sharon, a former Web editor at Fine Cooking, writes of her courtship with her husband while at Yale Divinity School and the introduction of culinary creativity into their blossoming relationship. Mothers and daughters, especially, will find great appeal in this endearing book of heartfelt personal histories accented with accessible recipes from authors who freely exhibit an “intelligent and thoughtful approach to food.”
A scrumptious pairing of nourishment and familial devotion.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-7895-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
