A polished, insightful how-to book for cooks at all levels.
Sarazen teaches readers to craft perfect recipes in this debut food guide.
There’s a lot more to creating a recipe than jotting a list of ingredients onto a notecard—even if that’s the form in which many of us encountered recipes for the first time. The author’s curiosity about recipes began in the kitchen of her grandmother, Sonia: “I believe that recipes (like my grandmother’s) are meant to be shared,” she writes in her introduction. “For recipes to live on, they must be accurately recorded.” With this book, Sarazen shepherds readers through the recipe-making process, from the earliest stages of development all the way to publishing them for others to use. She discusses how considerations like flavor combinations, aroma, and mouthfeel fit into a successful recipe, as well as issues of nutrition, allergens, and the requirements of various diets. She also shows the reader how to write and edit their recipes, both for ease of use and for descriptive precision (including the types of recipe titles that should be avoided). Sarazen even offers tips on how to style and photograph food, and guidance on making videos to help illustrate the cooking process. The book is, essentially, a recipe for recipes, and as such it embodies all the tenets that Sarazen preaches: It’s intuitively (and tastefully) organized, with crystal-clear prose and easy-to-follow how-tos for every possible situation. Here the author walks readers through the process of having their recipes sent to a lab for nutritional analysis: “Each laboratory has its own packing and shipping requirements, but in general, plan to ship the samples overnight or next day in the condition in which they must be to remain edible.” This book will be most helpful for bloggers or food influencers looking to professionalize their recipe game, but anyone interested in setting their recipes down on paper will learn plenty.
A polished, insightful how-to book for cooks at all levels.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780880912006
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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