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
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
