More soufflé than pie at times but good fun.
Humorist Blount (Alphabetter Juice: Or, the Joy of Text, 2011, etc.) serves up helpings of praise to food in a collection of yarns and poems.
There’s not much point to the author’s celebration. But then, there’s not much point to Blount’s style of homespun storytelling; the pleasure is in the telling and in the hearing or reading and not so much in the payoff. The only thing the present book proves “is that food gets into nearly everything [he] write[s].” Blount means that figuratively, of course, for the prime operating principle is never to let the opportunity for a groaner to go by without providing it. There are lots of bad jokes—perhaps the worst involving an exchange between a watermelon and a fruitcake—and lots of worse poetry (“Put a little dough on your hook and throw it out thayor / And pop you got a fish that cooked’ll be fit for a mayor”). But there’s also lots of well-formed, thoughtful reminiscence about the food of yore against the foodie-ism of today, as well as some of the constants that join the two eras—e.g., the chili dog: “these are neat chili dogs, even when you add the chopped onions, which are handed to you wrapped up in waxed paper so you can add as many of them as you like.” Blount has fun twitting regional preferences in food, too, as when he happily exposes the fact that, like so many Yankees, “Stephen King is horrified by okra.” As scary things go, okra is a good one, but then so is scrapple—and not everyone appreciates a good possum-cooking competition, which Blount describes from a judge’s point of view. Or perhaps a philosopher’s: “I don’t want to sound like a skittish person,” he writes, “but sometimes a situation strikes me as just slightly unsteady enough that I begin to anticipate an ontological shift.”
More soufflé than pie at times but good fun.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-17520-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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