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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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