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AT BALTHAZAR

Name: AT BALTHAZAR
Author: Reggie Nadelson
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1677-3

THE NEW YORK BRASSERIE AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

by Reggie Nadelson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2017

A glowing homage best suited to patrons of the esteemed New York restaurant it portrays.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)