The book is not a page-turner, as Bilow offers readers a slow-cooked story, with tenderness and intermingled flavors...
Bon Appetit writer Bilow chronicles her time on an organic farm, adding to her resume as a food writer and classically trained chef.
As the author drifted through freelance writing work that never paid enough, she set her intentions for change. An assignment to write about a Community Supported Agricultural operation sparked more than her interest, and she began to spend days laboring there. Layer in her muscular, handsome fellow farmer, Ian, and it seemed her quest for change was complete. Bilow spent more than a year living on the farm, eventually running the CSA and marketing operations. Her descriptions of mundane tasks and the hard work of farm living are sobering and well-wrought, punctuated by brilliant descriptions of savory farm-fresh meals. The author divides the book into five seasonal sections (she was at the farm during two springs), each followed by tantalizing recipes Bilow cooked for the farm crew or just Ian—e.g., mint and yogurt-marinated chicken, honey butter and blistered tomato gratin. The story flits from one meal to the next, since for Bilow, it all comes down to the food. “I understood that while sometimes farmers could cultivate a real sense of appreciation and adoration for a homemade meal, it was just as often eaten in a rush,” she writes. “I supposed…that was just one more difference between real farmers and myself. To my mind, the whole point of it all was the meal.” Aside from the food, the other main narrative thread is the author’s love affair with Ian. Bilow brings sensuality to every scene, with rich descriptions of food and farm life, from washing freshly laid eggs to rendering lard.
The book is not a page-turner, as Bilow offers readers a slow-cooked story, with tenderness and intermingled flavors enriched over time.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1615192144
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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