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HOW TO MAKE A FRENCH FAMILY

Name: HOW TO MAKE A FRENCH FAMILY
Author: Samantha Vérant
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3849-0

A MEMOIR OF LOVE, FOOD, AND FAUX PAS

by Samantha Vérant ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2017

Those looking for a breezy read about a transplanted American in France may be satisfied, but the book dwells more on...

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A determinedly positive memoir about starting life over as mother to a family in southwestern France.

Vérant’s first memoir (Seven Letters from Paris, 2014) chronicled the author’s fairy-tale romance with a handsome French rocket scientist she had met 20 years earlier and then pursued after a divorce and a business failure left her in debt. This book is the happily-ever-after follow-up, in which the two marry and the author takes responsibility for her new husband’s two children, preteen Max and teenage Elvire. Rugby-playing Max took the new situation in stride; “porcelain doll” Elvire was less taken with her new stepmother. In short, peppy chapters, the author describes the stages of her adjustment to life in France. She got her driver’s license, made some expatriate friends, gradually increased her knowledge of the language, learned to scuba dive and ski, wrote her first memoir, and, along with her husband, renovated their house. As a “glass-is-half-full, not empty kind of girl,” Vérant touches on but doesn’t explore deeply the emotional pain of miscarriage. Instead, she provides accounts of family vacations, holiday get-togethers, the self-created “Stepmother’s Day,” and delicious meals, for some of which she supplies recipes, including one for “frushi” (French sushi). Her husband, Jean-Luc, can be “a little bossy,” but they never “argue, yell, or fight,” instead employing the “bonobo strategy” of using sex to defuse anger. The author’s descriptions tend toward the generic: one friend’s husband is “tall, dark, and handsome,” and another’s “dashing and charming.” So do her insights: “life is a bowl of cherries, even when there are pits”; “even with its twists and turns, nature eventually takes its course.”

Those looking for a breezy read about a transplanted American in France may be satisfied, but the book dwells more on Vérant’s personal life than on observations of the world around her.

Pub Date: April 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4926-3849-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)