Quibbles aside, devotees of Ruth Reichl and M.F.K. Fisher will gobble up this delicious new gastronomic biography.
Brandon serves up the life story of a man who changed the way rich and poor ate.
Alexis Soyer cooked for 19th-century England. Moving from France to Blighty as a young man, he cooked at Aston Hall and at London’s Reform Club, where his creations—haricot and lentil salad, truffles stuffed with ortolans, “New Spring and Autumn Soup”—earned him renown as he transformed the kitchens of the Reform Club into “one of the sights of London.” But, as Brandon’s (Surreal Lives, 1999, etc.) well-chosen title makes clear, Soyer was no mere servant to English bon vivants. He was also a culinary innovator and social reformer. In the late 1840s, he became consumed by the problems of the poor and designed a new soup kitchen to serve them. Disgusted by what was available at most such kitchens, he published Soyer’s Charitable Cookery: or, The Poor Man’s Regenerator, which spelled out healthy, cheap recipes for the “poor and labouring classes.” When he set up a soup kitchen in Dublin, he was heralded as a savior. Soyer’s final act of service was to the British in the Crimean War, where he invented an innovative field stove and oversaw the kitchen at a military hospital in Constantinople. His 1858 death was mourned throughout the Empire. As Florence Nightingale commented, Europe boasted plenty of other gourmands, but there was no one else who had turned his epicurean skill to the nutritious feeding of the masses. Brandon tells Soyer’s story briskly, though not flawlessly. A confusing literary device—structuring the book around a menu, and opening each chapter with a recipe—distracts from the overall fare. (Do we really need to know that the mention of bones, in a recipe for soup, reminds Brandon of “my mother’s continually simmering stockpot”?)
Quibbles aside, devotees of Ruth Reichl and M.F.K. Fisher will gobble up this delicious new gastronomic biography.Pub Date: April 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-8027-1452-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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