Easy recipes delivered with homey appeal.
An accessible approach to basic cooking skills for beginners in the kitchen from Finnegan.
The book begins with a brief overview of the history of cooking. From there, the author takes the reader through some staple kitchen ingredients and simple instructions for how they may be generally prepared. She starts with potatoes and continues with more essentials, including proteins, soups, and sauces. The recipes don’t include many specific measurements aside from the sections on baking, which emphasize the ingredients’ ratios to each other. Each section is accompanied by a short history of the primary ingredient being explored. The final chapters break this format—Chapter 9 provides a list of examples of possible accidents that may happen in the kitchen, and Chapter 10 is a collection of thoughts and “rants” related to cooking and modern trends (it also cites some helpful tips from the author’s own mother). The recipes themselves are exactly what the book says they will be: the very basics. Overall, the book has a lighthearted tone, which includes seemingly throwaway comments in the recipes like, “My husband’s favourite, and he was great at cooking it.” The layout of the pages is poor, however, with many of the images being oddly sized, awkwardly placed, and ineptly cropped. The text appears in multiple fonts, colors, varying degrees of boldness, and contains typos. While there’s an appendix dedicated to books that Finnegan recommends, citations would have been helpful for readers who want to learn more about some of the author’s historical material. Additionally, more detail in the recipes would have been appreciated. Sépi, the cookbook’s illustrator, works in a style reminiscent of cartoonist Gary Larson; the illustrations do little to enhance the text, but they don’t detract from the contents. Despite the technical imperfections, the cookbook maintains a cozy charm and casualness that may evoke readers’ memories of cooking with their own parents or grandparents.
Easy recipes delivered with homey appeal.Pub Date: May 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781739432829
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Callender Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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