by Raymond Sokolov ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013
Perhaps a bit too acidic for some tastes, but most foodies will find the book refreshingly different.
A knowledgeable look at the transformation of fine dining over the past half-century, viewed through the prism of the author’s personal history.
When Sokolov succeeded Craig Claiborne as food editor of the New York Times in 1971, he was unimpressed by the city’s ossified restaurant scene. Bolstered by “the ego of a child prodigy” (he was a National Spelling Bee contestant at age 10), Sokolov dismissed the fare at Manhattan’s established French restaurants as mediocre imitations of the authentic French cuisine he had savored while a Newsweek correspondent in Paris. Management rather liked the stir Sokolov made with his glowing review of a humble Sichuan restaurant attached to a New Jersey gas station; they were less enthusiastic about a survey of dog foods that Sokolov acknowledges sardonically spoofed his regular gig, nor did they appreciate the generally “anti-establishment and rhetorically flamboyant” tone of his work. Sokolov was fired in 1973, less than a year after his prescient Times column embracing the nouvelle cuisine revolution being fomented in France by Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard and the other Young Turks. In his fuller assessment here, Sokolov disdains the marketing of nouvelle cuisine as "the cuisine of modern, slim people," arguing that its true significance was as “a most elaborate system of culinary parody, punning and metaphor.” Readers unconvinced by this provocative claim may nonetheless enjoy the author’s braininess and brashness as he goes on to chronicle a freelance career that included a highly intellectual food column for Natural History magazine before he settled down for 19 years as editor of the daily arts page for the Wall Street Journal. Sokolov is equally stimulating on the “molecular gastronomy” of Ferran Adrià and other modernist chefs.
Perhaps a bit too acidic for some tastes, but most foodies will find the book refreshingly different.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-70094-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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PROFILES
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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