A glowing homage best suited to patrons of the esteemed New York restaurant it portrays.
In this clubby portrait, a novelist and journalist seeks to understand what makes one of her favorite restaurants a New York institution.
Opened in 1997, Balthazar is notable for both its longevity and its function as a kind of buzzy community center for a certain strata of Manhattanites. A Balthazar regular, Nadelson (Manhattan 62, 2014, etc.) brings her fine observational skills to an investigation of what makes it the quintessential New York restaurant. Her method is to accumulate detail, and so we learn everything from the biography of the immigrant owner of the SoHo building to what the kitchen served neighbors in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In between, we get fleeting profiles not just of restaurateur Keith McNally, but of the Mexican busser who refills morning coffee, the chef who oversees the 1,500 meals a day that come out of the kitchen, the reservationist, the bartender, and even the farmer who grows the potatoes for the restaurant’s renowned pommes frites. We listen to celebrity regulars like chef David Chang gush about the oysters and watch the painstaking work of Balthazar’s servers, cooks, porters, and pastry chefs. However, this is not a Kitchen Confidential–style exposé of the sometimes-rollicking, sometime-harsh realities of restaurant life. At Balthazar, it seems, the frisee aux lardons is always delicious, the customers are unerringly sophisticated and considerate, and the employees—all 250 of them—are uniformly gracious and unflappable. Yet the mises-en-scène never fully come together in a coherent story. Although the Balthazar that Nadelson describes seems like a lovely place to eat, the net effect of all that gentle characterization and warming praise is to make both restaurant and book seem self-congratulatory and insular. Without a strong narrative arc or clear argument, the book doesn’t offer much sustenance to readers who haven’t dined there.
A glowing homage best suited to patrons of the esteemed New York restaurant it portrays.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1677-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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
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