Manno’s debut is a memoir which chronicles his love of food and family and his restless search for purpose.
What would Mama say? The surprising answer to this question—posed by Italian chef and restaurateur Manno as often as garden-ripe tomatoes and olive oil grace the pages of this memoir with recipes—comes at the end of a long journey that begins in poverty in Calabria, Italy. There, as a young boy, Manno runs barefoot tending his small herd of goats before the chance for a better life takes his family to Milan. After several dissatisfying jobs, including a lengthy stint as a delivery boy at a butcher shop, teenage Manno seizes on the idea of becoming a chef. A surprise visit from his American cousin Al alters Manno’s life forever when Al offers to sponsor Manno in California. At 20, Manno becomes an immigrant in the San Joaquin Valley and begins life anew again. The author’s primary loves are his mother and food, the latter unquestioned. Food, and the high he gets from “working the line,” informs his thoughts and writing, and leads to metaphors such as: “the dreadful feeling of not fully sucking the marrow out of life persisted.” Like other foreigners before him, Manno shares keen observations about American food habits and culture, both good and bad. He provides a mirror through which readers can see their own culture reflected back, whether discussing abundance and the sense of infinite possibility, or waste and the unsettling feeling of impermanence and lack of tradition. Throughout this heartfelt memoir, readers will be anxious to discover what’s next as the author takes on new challenges and straddles the divide of two cultures. A compelling glimpse into modern American food and immigrant cultures.
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-615-41319-8
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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