Reichl (who “raced through electric streets” in Thailand) likes it in the fast track—but she has a tendency to hog the lane...
More memoirs from Gourmet editor Reichl (Tender at the Bone, 1998, etc.), highly focused (on the food world of Berkeley, New York, and Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s) and grindingly self-absorbed.
In the late 1970s, Reichl was married to a winsome environmental artist named Doug, living in Berkeley, and reviewing restaurants for New West magazine. She embarked on a torrid affair with another food writer, Colman Andrews, and we are treated to detailed account of this liaison, in which she comes across as both dishonest and irresponsible (while the hapless Andrews appears merely as a pompous gasbag). They fell in love, they went to Paris. He dumped her. She traveled to China. There, thankfully, the foreignness of the land washed over her, and the wonder of it all informed her narrative. Reichl can turn a lovely phrase (“I followed her through the dark living room and into the kitchen, thinking how very blue the flower tasted”), and she can also swap hackneyed comparisons with the best of them (truffles, for example, “tasted the way a forest smells in autumn”). There is a terrific interlude when she visits M.F.K. Fisher and learns of her teaching at Piney Woods in 1964, but by then way too much time is spent detailing a disastrous visit by her mother to her next lover’s pad. Another travel episode, to Thailand, is a winner, but her coverage of Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois opening and her courtship by the Los Angeles Times will have readers suffocating in all things Ruth. Just when you've had enough comes a disarming chapter on her tragic adoption of a baby girl (who was subsequently returned to the birth mother against the author's wishes).
Reichl (who “raced through electric streets” in Thailand) likes it in the fast track—but she has a tendency to hog the lane to herself.Pub Date: April 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50195-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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