A highly readable, well-researched narrative chronicling America’s boring culinary past and the one man who altered its...
Taking on the subject of another giant in the food world, McNamee (Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, 2008, etc.) traces the life of the fascinating and troubled man who transformed America’s bleak culinary landscape into the lush food environment of today.
In a media world jammed with TV shows featuring celebrity chefs, thousands of cookbooks, food blogs, specialty stores devoted to kitchen tools and ubiquitous online restaurant reviews, it is hard to perceive what passed for cuisine in 1950s America. Home cooking was belittled as drudgery, and the country lacked great cooking schools like those in Europe. Food criticism as a profession didn’t exist, and the new TV culture hailed frozen foods as the next great leap forward for homemakers. Craig Claiborne (1920–2000) grew up steeped in the succulent flavors of the Mississippi Delta, and he attended a leading hotel school in Switzerland, where he absorbed the techniques of classical French cooking and formal service. He became the food editor for the New York Times in1957, beginning a reasoned critique of New York’s restaurant scene and the lackluster culture of American food. “Henceforward, and with steadily increasing force,” writes McNamee, “he would become America’s leading authority on food. A good review from Craig Claiborne would have a restaurant’s telephones ringing day and night; a bad one would silence them.” For the next 30 years, Claiborne was the emperor of food, writing hundreds of food columns and publishing more than 20 books. He explored exotic locations and their cuisines and introduced a rainbow of new ingredients and flavors to America’s kitchens. He also launched the careers of numerous culinary personalities, including Marcella Hazan and Diana Kennedy, and he elevated home cooking into a joyful experience. McNamee deftly explores the glittering public life and far-reaching contributions Claiborne made to America’s food culture, as well as his troubled personal life.
A highly readable, well-researched narrative chronicling America’s boring culinary past and the one man who altered its course forever.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9150-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
