A quirky, novelistic tour as much about the author as Jerusalem.
A memoir of a year spent in the Old City in the heart of today’s Jerusalem.
Tuttle-Singer, the new media editor at the Times of Israel, was enraptured with life in Jerusalem ever since her first youthful visit, and she remains in love with the Holy Land as a grown-up Israeli now living again in the ancient city. During the year she chronicles, the author lived part of each week on a communal moshav with her two young children. The rest of the week, she lived in the various quarters of the Old City, where the disparate Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures are encapsulated in one small spot on a map. “On the days I’m not with my kids,” she writes, “I’m in the Old City, because it’s one thing to understand this place through the thoroughfares, and it’s quite another to go behind the walls and see what’s hidden, what doesn’t meet the eye.” Tuttle-Singer enjoyed views from the city’s rooftops, watched Arab elders play backgammon, and danced with bar mitzvah celebrants. She delighted in such things as the “amazing” chicken-and-rice dish called maklouba and the wide variety of odors wafting through the city. She was friendly with merchants and became a confidante of many candid residents of the walled district. It wasn’t all charm and understanding, though. There were the nervous young soldiers carrying rifles and demonstrators throwing rocks. When she was 18, the author was stoned by Palestinian kids. During her youth in Los Angeles, she lost her mother, who now haunts her daughter’s impassioned memoir, which tends toward the operatic. Certain descriptive passages of the sounds and sights may be a bit rich for some readers, but Tuttle-Singer’s approachable personality will prevail for a good many more.
A quirky, novelistic tour as much about the author as Jerusalem.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2489-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Noted jazz and pop record producer Thiele offers a chatty autobiography. Aided by record-business colleague Golden, Thiele traces his career from his start as a ``pubescent, novice jazz record producer'' in the 1940s through the '50s, when he headed Coral, Dot, and Roulette Records, and the '60s, when he worked for ABC and ran the famous Impulse! jazz label. At Coral, Thiele championed the work of ``hillbilly'' singer Buddy Holly, although the only sessions he produced with Holly were marred by saccharine strings. The producer specialized in more mainstream popsters like the irrepressibly perky Teresa Brewer (who later became his fourth wife) and the bubble-machine muzak-meister Lawrence Welk. At Dot, Thiele was instrumental in recording Jack Kerouac's famous beat- generation ramblings to jazz accompaniment (recordings that Dot's president found ``pornographic''), while also overseeing a steady stream of pop hits. He then moved to the Mafia-controlled Roulette label, where he observed the ``silk-suited, pinky-ringed'' entourage who frequented the label's offices. Incredibly, however, Thiele remembers the famously hard-nosed Morris Levy, who ran the label and was eventually convicted of extortion, as ``one of the kindest, most warm-hearted, and classiest music men I have ever known.'' At ABC/Impulse!, Thiele oversaw the classic recordings of John Coltrane, although he is the first to admit that Coltrane essentially produced his own sessions. Like many producers of the day, Thiele participated in the ownership of publishing rights to some of the songs he recorded; he makes no apology for this practice, which he calls ``entirely appropriate and without any ethical conflicts.'' A pleasant, if not exactly riveting, memoir that will be of most interest to those with a thirst for cocktail-hour stories of the record biz. (25 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508629-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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