A great pleasure for foodies, chronicling an unlikely revolution.
It was hard to get a decent meal in America before 1971. Alice Waters helped change all that.
Not single-handedly, of course. But Waters, in France for a semester abroad in 1965, had an awakening: Like Julia Child, whose My Life in France (2000) McNamee (The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone, 1997) nicely bookends, she learned to eat simple food that was fresh and well-chosen. She came home disillusioned with the monstrous cuisine of her native land. “I wanted hot baguettes in the morning, and apricot jam, and café au lait in bowls, and I wanted a café to hang out in the afternoon, and I wanted civilized meals, and I wanted to wear French clothes,” she recalls. She set out for Berkeley, where she absorbed radical ideas and mind-altering substances and opened a restaurant-cum-commune whose inaugural meal, in 1971, was a nice pâté, duck with olives, a plum tart and coffee. It cost $3.95, expensive at the time but nothing like the tariff today. Chez Panisse, named after a French film character, was instantly successful, though Waters, as McNamee clearly shows, wasn’t the most scrupulous businesswoman. She hired people who thought it might be cool to cook or bake or wait tables, and she watched huge amounts of inventory—especially wine—walk out the door. She refused to dress the staff up in tuxedos and such or impose much discipline on a difficult but brilliant bunch, and her stubbornness nearly proved fatal to the restaurant several times. Even when she took on partners with an eye to imposing budgetary reason, she did what she liked: “No matter what the legal papers said, Chez Panisse, from day one, was Alice’s, to be operated, populated, decorated, redecorated, reconceived, fussed over, fiddled with, and loved as Alice saw fit.” Amazingly, as McNamee chronicles, the place survived, and thrived, and Waters—likable on every page, if perhaps a touch scattered—helped change the way Americans ate.
A great pleasure for foodies, chronicling an unlikely revolution.Pub Date: March 26, 2007
ISBN: 1-59420-115-3
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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