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
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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