Energetic account of a comedienne’s mishaps in the kitchen as she prepares meals for family and friends.
Calamities in the kitchen for a newbie chef.
Rafferty, former writer for The Soup, brings yet another snarky voice to the myriad of memoirs that revolve around culinary experiments and dinner parties by inexperienced cooks. What distinguishes this author from others is her insatiable appetite for wine, her indomitable spirit in the face of catastrophe, her resolute desire to please everyone and her offbeat sense of humor. Rafferty wittily pokes fun at herself and her attempts to pull off Martha Stewart–type meals in a tiny apartment hardly big enough for one, let alone seven guests who often don't know the difference between good and bad wine. Runny gravy, watery polenta and a cranky boyfriend running on empty are all included in a hodgepodge of memories. Attacking each meal with gusto, Rafferty discusses entertaining at some of the most important food moments of the year, Thanksgiving and Christmas, as well as preparing a dinner for well-known restaurant owners and volunteering to cater a baby shower for 100 guests. She yearns to satisfy appetites and create memories that extend beyond the frazzled nerves (before and after the meal) and the occasional outbreak of tears. For Rafferty, "preparing food is a meditation," even if something goes wrong and "the food sucks." Recipes at the end of each chapter enhance the narrative, but some readers may find more fluff than sustenance as they tag along for the ride.
Energetic account of a comedienne’s mishaps in the kitchen as she prepares meals for family and friends.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01143-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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