Bon appetit to readers who agree with that rather sweeping statement; even those who don’t will enjoy the cheerful anecdotes...
A restaurant critic and food writer’s engaging recollections: part memoir, part cookbook.
Boorstin was clearing out an unused desk when she unearthed a notebook of 30-year-old recipes that recalled her youth and led her to examine cuisine connections among family and friends. She didn’t just forage in her memory bank; she sought out and reconnected with friends from school days, as well as more recent acquaintances. The memories they share are often funny (mushrooms stuffed with marijuana, the snails that got away) and sometimes wistful, as divorce, sickness, and death play inescapable roles over three decades. Food professionals Boorstin encountered in the course of her work make cameo appearances and contribute recipes: Julia Child explains how to cook a lobster; Wolfgang Puck passes along his formula for matzoh; and Nell Newman reveals the makings of father Paul’s favorite angel-food cake. Other recipes include avocado soup from London via Kenya, the perfect gazpacho from Spain, and a “husband-catcher cake” handed down for three generations (apparently it works). Especially winning are tales of her mother, who always kept a big chest freezer filled with frozen marshmallows, big oatmeal cookies, and Dungeness crab legs. (Dad was vice president of a Seattle fish company.) Mom was a good cook, but given to doctoring vegetables with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup (an icon of 1950s cuisine) and “all business” with Sharon in the kitchen. Boorstin made it a point to welcome her own daughter warmly into the kitchen, where they listened to opera, gossiped, and became friends as they cooked sans canned mushroom soup. “Women bond over food the way men do over sports,” she concludes.
Bon appetit to readers who agree with that rather sweeping statement; even those who don’t will enjoy the cheerful anecdotes and the memorable dishes. (photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-001283-8
Page Count: 338
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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