New Orleans forms the richly atmospheric backdrop for a determined, eccentric family who found success in the steakhouse business.
University English teacher and president of two foundations named in his mother’s honor, Fertel eloquently traces his family history back to his childhood as one of two sons born to food lover Ruth and gambling aficionado Rodney, heir to a shady pawnshop business renowned for being “the biggest fences in the South.” Fertel’s parents married young in 1948 and enjoyed 11 years together before separating, Ruth leaning toward business and Rodney, after taking his son on lavish vacations to Europe, launching two outlandish New Orleans mayoral bids with separate campaign promises: one to acquire a gorilla for the zoo, the other to relocate the Blarney Stone to the Superdome. Though the narrative is a bit disjointed and lacks a cohesive ebb and flow (the generous photographs help, however), Fertel’s memoir gains momentum when he details his mother’s fascinating and resilient ascent to eventual nationwide notoriety with the 1965 purchase of the Chris Steak House brand. Her ownership of the restaurant did not get off to good start, as the flagship restaurant was located in a sketchy part of town, some bad blood with the former owner erupted and a fire forced her to relocate and rename it the “hard to forget” Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Christened “the First Lady of American restaurants,” Fertel expands further on his mother’s notoriously delectable taste in quality meats, her distinctive flare for atmosphere and her love and respect for her staff. Ruth succumbed to cancer in 2002, having sold the business three years prior—though, her son lovingly notes, she remains “one of the great restaurateurs in a city of great restaurants.” Fertel ends his memoir with a somber chapter on Hurricane Katrina’s massive devastation, which swept five feet of water into the Ruth’s Chris flagship store. An uneven but zesty chronicle—worth a look for food historians.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61703-082-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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