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
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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