Knowledgeable inspiration for getting out there and getting dirty.
A journalist who “grew up in a food-focused household” chronicles her adventures gardening and eating in Cape Cod.
In 2008, Haspel, a James Beard Award–winning columnist for the Washington Post, and her husband, Kevin, moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod, trading their rooftop garden for a “shack on a lake.” The next New Year’s Day, Haspel floated a new idea: For the next year, they would “eat at least one thing we grew, hunted, or gathered every day.” Rather than relying on experts, the author preferred suggestions from her neighbors who were fighting the same difficult growing conditions. She also notes that she has “learned the most from just getting dirty, from trying things.” With witty insight, the author shares their successes and failures along with tips and how-to advice. As they acclimated to their new environment, she and her husband got involved in “the vibrant bartering that goes on in every community where people grow food; we’ve traded eggs for jam, pickles, asparagus, venison, and tomato seedlings.” On their land and the surrounding areas, they successfully fished, hunted, raised fowl, and grew delicious shiitake mushrooms. Parts of the narrative are repetitious—Haspel is candid about how “bits and pieces of [the book] have been published elsewhere”—and some readers may squirm at her descriptions of preparing roadkill to eat, dressing turkeys, and shooting her first deer. Although the author doesn’t espouse the view that eating meat is unethical, she believes in minimizing suffering and that “eating overpopulated (or at least unthreatened) animals [is] responsible and planet-friendly.” Despite the scope of the book being limited to the resources found on Cape Cod and its surrounding waterways, it’s a great stepping-off point for individuals interested in exploring “first-hand food opportunities” and exercising more control over the origins of what they eat.
Knowledgeable inspiration for getting out there and getting dirty.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-41953-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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