Eighteen years after her first book, the well-regarded Perla Meyers' Seasonal Kitchen, and 12 years since her last major one, Perla Meyers' From Market to Kitchen Cookbook, this Spanish-born American author is still extolling local seasonal produce but also drawing on the global pantry that has become available in the interim. The present collection, still seasonally arranged, embraces both old-fashioned and nouvelle concepts, owes much to French and Italian motifs, and tends to company fare, dressed up in sauces, ``marmalades'' (not necessarily sweet or fruity), and various mixed toppings and trimmings. But none of this is tricky or elaborate, nor are Meyers's combinations capricious. Her hefty compilation of dishes, from soy-sauced black-bean salad or double- squash soup to roasted red-pepper quiche or veal medallions with chanterelles and apples, is well timed to meet an emerging demand for dishes that are original but not outrÇ and meals that are a little more formal than the snappy, emphatic features of the 80's but lighter and easier than the gourmet clunkers of a generation past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-64984-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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