Intensely involving: a character study of a gifted, driven man and the world that created him.
Enthralling plunge into the world of the late Bernard Loiseau: celebrity chef, P.R. genius, and manic-depressive.
When Loiseau killed himself, all of France was stunned. A three-star chef with a loving family and good press doesn’t make for the most obvious candidate for suicide. Chelminski, a veteran journalist and long-time friend, takes a fly-on-the-wall position to track the career of a scrappy kid who made it to the culinary stratosphere and abruptly plunged back to earth. Loiseau was the son of a traveling salesman who, purely through a random personal connection, got him an apprenticeship at Les Frères Troisgros, a stellar eatery that would soon receive its third Michelin star. From here the intensely ambitious and big-talking Bernard soon made a great leap to running some very popular restaurants in Paris. Then he made a strange move: he relocated to the provincial backwater of Saulieu with the intention of establishing a three-star restaurant in a rundown local hotel. Amazingly, he did it. Through force of will, gastronomic inventiveness and an exquisitely sensitive palate, Bernard made Saulieu, in Michelin’s parlance, a destination worthy of a special journey. From there, however, his world began to spin out of control, as he took on massive debt to finance expansion, endorsed supermarket products and ran an exhausting publicity machine. It all worked while his energy was up, but sometimes he was way, way down, most notably on a disastrous trip to Japan in 1992 and again in 2002, before he took his own life. Chelminski excels at creating Loiseau’s milieu: the colorful history and inner workings of that bastion of secrecy, the Guide Michelin; the frantic pace of a three-star chef who must keep the machine oiled, running and financed; the whims of fickle French gastronomes.
Intensely involving: a character study of a gifted, driven man and the world that created him.Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 1-592-40107-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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