A captivating culinary project was born when a friend gave Outside magazine correspondent Rinella a copy of Le Guide Culinaire.
Published by master chef Auguste Escoffier in 1903, the guide featured exotic recipes for bird’s-nest soup, pigeon giblets in puff pastry and selle de chevreuil Briand (saddle of antelope with bear fat and poached pears in red wine). Rinella became obsessed with Escoffier’s cookbook because of its assumption that any chef worth his salt kills his own antelope, catches his own trout and digs for his own oysters. Rinella, you see, is an avid hunter. He eats everything he kills and prefers to limit his diet as much as possible to food he procures himself. So he decided to devote one year to gathering the ingredients for a 45-course, three-day Escoffier feast. Readers follow him to Iowa, where he collected sparrows; to San Juan Island, where he fished ling cod; and to a place in Montana where he hunted elk. (He won’t divulge the exact spot, lest a horde of eager readers encroach on his hunting ground.) All the while, he tried to convert vegetarian girlfriend Diana to a meat-eater. The final, hilarious scenes of this mouth-watering memoir depict Rinella and his friends preparing, savoring and occasionally being revolted by the Escoffier fête. Even Diana adored the oysters and caviar, but the crayfish mousse didn’t go over well. The author never indulges in ideological ranting, but readers will inevitably find themselves thinking about how radically removed most of us are from the sources of the food we eat. A vivid description of foie gras production may put you off the stuff forever.
The manly response to Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia (2005).Pub Date: March 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-5237-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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