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 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
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