A wildly inventive excursion through the creation of our daily bread—and our occasional carp à l’ancienne.
Four hours? A gimmick, to be sure, but a good one to lure you into this rangy, obsessive immersion in food and its many wonders.
We should become more conversant with the pot, the pan and all that issues therefrom, writes life-improvement guru Ferriss (The 4-Hour Body, 2010, etc.). You have so much to lose by not doing so. Eating well tones your body and mind, impresses people and increases your mating advantage. Even more, the tools needed to learn to cook well can be deployed in every manner of endeavor, from skinning a deer to memorizing a deck of cards. The author distills them into minimal, learnable units and examines how to order the units so as to keep readers engaged in their endeavors. Ferriss is a beguiling guide to this process, at once charmingly smart aleck-y and deadly serious, and he aims to make readers knowledgeable and freethinking. The author demonstrates how to hold a knife and cut an onion, but he also provides an engagement with the outdoors—how to build a shelter and butcher a kill, how to shop in Calcutta’s outdoor market and recognize a squirrel’s chirp (“akin to a Jack Russell digging through a chalkboard”). Ferriss also examines better eating through chemistry, which leads quite naturally to an extended encounter with Grant Achatz’s legendarily avant-garde cuisine—e.g., cigar-infused tequila hot chocolate. Ferriss is everywhere—preventing fat gain when you binge, poaching an egg, butchering a chicken, using liquid nitrogen, making a bacon rose—but is always focused on the main course: good eating.
A wildly inventive excursion through the creation of our daily bread—and our occasional carp à l’ancienne.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0547884592
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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