Filled with loving portraits of quirky characters, Majumdar’s series of vignettes is a candid and endearing snapshot of not...
A food writer’s cross-country search for what it means to be an American.
Yorkshire-raised food writer and Food Network personality Majumdar (Eating for Britain: A Journey Into the Heart (and Belly) of the Nation, 2011, etc.) recently relocated from his beloved Britain to Los Angeles to live with his girlfriend. However, after several years of American life, he was still bewildered by the prospect of becoming a “true” American. What, exactly, does that mean? Knowing from experience that food is the easiest way to a culture’s heart, the author embarked on a coast-to-coast tour seeking out culinary enclaves to find the secret to Americanness. One of Majumdar’s first lessons was that ethnicity and food culture often go hand in hand, and his experiences among the burgeoning yet still largely unrecognized Filipino community of Los Angeles prove that ethnic groups eat traditional food with a sense of pride for their homeland but also incorporate contemporary style and conventions. Not all of his experiences were as gratifying. His trip to Philadelphia’s annual Wing Bowl alongside competitive eater Jamie McDonald was truly an American experience: “I’d be hard pressed to think of any other nation on earth where a competition to watch twenty three men eat as many chicken wings as they could in thirty minutes would attract 23,000 spectators, including every stripper in the city, at 7am.” Other highlights include goat’s head in the Bronx, a Nebraska meatpacking plant, and rather expected trips to Wisconsin and Alaska for cheese making and salmon fishing. But these are only a few examples from Majumdar’s diverse, patchworklike collection of foodie experiences. Regardless of where his travels took him, the author learned that if there is any constant throughout American culture, it’s that we love to eat and are proud of our food.
Filled with loving portraits of quirky characters, Majumdar’s series of vignettes is a candid and endearing snapshot of not only American food culture, but America itself.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-215-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
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