Brilliant as food writing, mediocre as memoir
591578
In Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl, the former restaurant critic of the New York Times and editor of Gourmet magazine, relates the story of her life from childhood up to the point in her early thirties when she gets her first food writing job. She uses the book to tease out of the origins of her love of food, and shares a few recipes and a great many food-related anecdotes.

Reichl's life is fascinating, and there's no shortage of incident to keep the book moving. She talks about her tumultuous childhood with a mentally ill mother, years spent at a boarding school in Montreal, adventures in North Africa, life in a hippie commune in Berkeley, a honeymoon spent bumming around Greece and Italy on a shoestring. Every story she tells features descriptions of food, and these are marvelous: handmade raspberry tarts in the French countryside, egg-filled Tunisian pastries, her first taste of brie, fresh organic soups at a collectively-owned restaurant in Berkeley--Reichl makes you feel like you can taste them all. Unfortunately, she doesn't write about herself nearly as well as she writes about her meals.

The biggest weakness of the book, in my opinion, is its lack of depth. Reichl tells us all sorts of things that happened to her, but she never really lets the reader in; we don't get to know her as a person through this book. She discusses her mother's mental illness and describes what it was like to grow up in her household, but she never makes me really feel what she went through. Everything is surface level. I was also somewhat frustrated by the sameness of some her anecdotes. Reichl includes about a million different variations on the theme of "cute American child surprises snooty Europeans with the sophistication of her palate," and, frankly, it got old after the second such story.

Despite these flaws, the book is a pleasant read. Very light and quick, and not demanding in the least. It probably would have been good on a beach. I doubt I'll seek out the rest of her memoir series, though. I've had enough of Ruth Reichl for the time being.
819556
This novel is as light and insubstantial as a souffle -- and about as memorable. It slips down easily while you're reading it -- and leaves almost no trace. It's about food and is reasonably tasty but provides little intellectual nourishment

There seems to be a sub-genre of fiction that I would term "food is my religion." Another example is the highly successful "Chocolat" by Joanne Harris. The belief that animates these books is that good food, lovingly prepared and eaten, has almost mystical powers. It can heal broken lives, repair fractured marriages, bring joy to those in mourning, restore meaning to empty existences -- in short, it can put the world right.

In this book, the quasi-magical chef Lillian has mastered the art of restorative eating and brought it to a new climax. As well as presiding over a temple (also known as a restaurant), she offers monthly classes to acolytes in need of her healing powers. We have a collection of characters taking the class -- the bereaved husband, the loving older couple whose faith was shaken by an affair, the klutzy youngster, the geek -- etc etc. By the time the class ends, all will be restored to wholeness.

None of these characters is in any way memorable. But that's beside to the point since the main character in the book is the food itself -- which is lovingly described so that it melts in your mouth on the page. Never has food tasted so good and been so wonderfully prepared. Even the brutal slaying of innocent crabs which provide the first entree takes on a mystical, even ethical tone.

If you love food and don't care much about the humans who eat it, this book is for you.
2202198
This book definitely kept my interest and I was able to finish it rather quickly. I liked her writing style and felt it read more like a novel than a memoir. The book seemed to be less about the food, a lot of the recipes included were not even mentioned or a part of the story, and more about her romance. I thought the romance added to the story of the book and not sure there would've been a story otherwise. I wanted more reflection from the author about the "finding herself" part of the subtitle. I found myself searching for what happened to her after that year, while I know it's a memoir about a year in her life, I didn't fully capture what she found out about herself as a conclusion. I don't know that I would classify this as a food-memoir, but I did think it was well written, interesting, and easy to read for an enjoyable read.
4895346
Apparently, Mishka Shubaly, author of I Swear I'll Make It Up To You: A Life On The Low Road is a successful singer-songwriter, having released three solo albums. He also has several bestselling Kindle singles through Amazon. That's good news, because as a memoirist, Shubaly leaves a lot to be desired.

The back cover of the review copy says, "Mishka Shubaly began drinking at 13 and college at 15." So, you'd think those two noteworthy factoids alone would make for an interesting memoir, right? Wrong. Shubaly manages to make even the most dramatic of substance abuse and personal trauma anecdotes seem somehow commonplace. He also appears shocked that the idiom about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas is repetitively true in his own life. No matter how many poor decisions Shubaly makes during the course of his narrative, it feels like he is perpetually grasping for a free pass from consequences of his actions and the empathy of his readers.

Instead of focusing on his bad life choice-making cycle, a memoir by Shubaly could've been considerably more compelling if it centered around his music, or his family's unique past. The section of Swear I'll Make It Up To You that takes place at Simon's Rock, the college program for high schoolers Shubaly attended, feels like a badly-written nonfiction version of Looking For Alaska, if the protagonist of Looking For Alaska had been Chip instead of Miles.

In summation, I sure won't be queuing up at the bookstore to purchase a copy of Mishka Shubaly's new memoir on its March 8th release date, and I don't advocate that you do so either, because I can't make it up to you if you spend your precious time and hard-earned money on this one.
1801091
A book about an Irish-French family from half way around the world  definitely sounds like an interesting read for me. The book was just that  an interesting memoir of an oversized family (by present standards).

The story traces the roots of writers family who emigrated from Ireland to Canada. Written almost chronologically, the story begins with writers parents getting married and eventually having the writer and her siblings. The writer eventually falls in love, gets married and has her own kids and has her fair share of losses. Being from a large family myself, I know what fun it is when all folks get together. The writer sure had a lot of fun. Sadly having so many characters in a book had me all confused. It would have helped if the writer had a family tree in the beginning of the book instead of the ending. Some anecdotes in the book had me in splits  like the title, where her grandmother replies as to why she had a lot kids in spite of being poor, while others lacked wit and humor. The writing was pretty raw and much like what a seasoned blogger would write if he/she were to write a book (in terms of language). The book has quite a handful of spell errors that had been overlooked. The high point of the book would be the emotions  all the characters in the book emoted perfectly as they would have in real life. Needless to say, being a memoir, the writer captured emotions pretty well. The other interesting feature of the book would be the songs that were featured.

NARRATION: 6/10

CHARACTERISATION: 7/10

BOREDOM QUOTIENT: 4/10 (lower the better)

OVERALL RATING: 6.5/10
4108964
Kitchen Confidential is a brash, entertaining, and funny look at life behind the scenes in restaurants. The book is a combination of expose, biography, and blunt advice for those interested in working in the restaurant industry.

Bourdain is a talented raconteur and a gifted writer. Some of his prose is hard to resist. For instance (on page 197), he describes the dinner tasting, where waiters at his restaurant sample the evening's food; the waiters "...fall on the family gruel and tasting plates like rabid jackals... They tear at the four plates of food, ripping apart the pheasant with their hands, nearly spearing each other with forks as they gouge at the tuna, drag cockles to their greasy maws with bare hands and quickly turn Janine's lovely tarte into a dark smear." It is difficult not to like a book that has a talented writer telling a good story.

Kitchen Confidential also features dozens of great characters. There is the Manhattan restaurateur Bourdain calls Bigfoot; a hulking former college basketball player with a talent for squeezing every nickel out of his restaurant. There is Adam Real-Last-Name-Unknown, a dysfunctional man who loses every job he takes. After each firing, Adam promptly gets another job because of his special talent for making delicious bread. There is also Bourdain: witty, profane, cocky, knowledgeable, and opinionated.

If there is a downside to Kitchen Confidential it is the fact that Bourdain's world is very seedy, profane, and, in many ways, deeply repellent; the reader becomes weary after a while. Bourdain's boastful descriptions of his profane tirades and drug addiction are particularly unappealing. The locker room atmosphere in which Bourdain chooses to work (no profanity is too vile or too explicit) is sophomoric. At its worst, Bourdain's world makes you feel as though you need a long, cleansing bath.

In spite of its problems, Kitchen Confidential allows the reader to journey to a world that he or she probably knows nothing about. It is a very entertaining book.
1304316
Although this is not the best book ever, some parts were worthy of being read.  I enjoyed learning about Hamilton's rise in the food industry and her life as the owner of a restaurant.  However, I have to say that the author's style is tedious- too much unnecessary detail.  I found myself skipping over passages because I could tell where they were headed, and were going to, unnecessarily, take three pages to get there.  The author is self-absorbed.  I know, it is a memoir, I just can't take it.

Let me be clear, I love Ruth Reichl, and other food writers like her.  However, this was a different kind of food writing.  There were good moments, but most of it was boring and too descriptive when it did not need to be.

The first half and second half of the book were disconnected.  Hamilton was a lesbian at the start of the book, then suddenly married to a man.  If you had read her bio before reading the book, you knew all along that she's no longer married in real life....

A good book about chefs that I enjoyed reading about 10 year ago (recently re-released) is "The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America" by Michael Ruhlman.
1069935
The book is marvelous for what it is, but a bit disappointing for what it is not. It was never meant to be a history of Vietnam, the battle history of the 101st Airborne in Vietnam, or even a personal history of Henry Enoch's time in Vietnam. This book is more of a filtered memoir, sharing some of his thoughts and experiences while on a one year tour of duty. The book is not a very intimate look, except by accident.

---The Good Stuff---

* Enoch is college educated, and writes well. I ended up reading the book in one day, and it kept my interest and attention.

* While there are no scandalous tell-all sections relating never before heard stories, there are some very interesting details, related almost matter-of-factly. For example, Enoch tells us that he is in country for several months before he even finds out where he is. And even then, he only finds out the name of the province-he still really has no idea of where exactly that province is. While this may exaggerate the point a bit, there has probably been no other American war where its troops didn't know where they were. To me, this spoke volumes.

* Similarly, Enoch spends much of the book relating very boring and mundane details of his existence. I know more about his diet and snack food habits than I do my own. And yet this is, to me, telling. Enoch was a grad student in Chemistry, and now his world revolves around his supply of Twinkies. No thoughts of battle strategy, no interest in how to better defeat the NVA-his brainpower is tied up with cookies. Not to criticize the author, but again, to me this speaks volumes.

* In the year that he is in country, you can almost feel his motivation and attitude collapse. The patrols get a little more relaxed; less attention to detail on guard duty; in short-a soldier who doesn't want to be there. His attention is far more riveted on personal comfort than any liberating of any country. Seems a remarkable contrast to WWII, which was only 20 years prior.

---The Not So Good Stuff---

* The descriptions of the author's day to day existence can get a bit boring. It seems that over half the words in the book describe meals, and three quarters describe basic creature comforts. While I think it makes an excellent point, as described above, it gets tedious.

* You won't learn anything about the war itself. Enoch never relates any details of anything that happened at a higher level than what happened to him and his five buddies.

---Overall---

It is certainly not the best book you will ever read about Vietnam, but it does provide a very realistic look at what was important to the grunts actually fighting the war. There was no fanatic patriotism, no sense of liberating the cities of Europe, no thought of strategy or tactics...just counting the days to "get back to the world." In a way, that probably says more about the war than anything else.

Since the book is relatively inexpensive, and a very quick read, I would say it is worth spending an afternoon or two to get an appreciation of the war through Sgt. Enoch's eyes.
4252560
This book extols the virtues of eating locally grown produce and food and is a sustained attack on agribusiness.  Part of my issue with this book is its schizophrenia.  Does it purport to be a food adventure, a recipe book, or a public policy commentary?  It attempts to be all of the above in different places, which I think undercuts the unity of the book, which occasionally reverts to a rather preachy tone.  With three different authors collaborating with in the same family, the book also occasionally exhausts the reader.

Reading about locally grown produce does make part of the book delicious and mouth watering.  Of course, not everyone lives out in the country with multiple acres to till.

Nevertheless, Team Kingsolver succeed in getting the reader buying and consumption in a more thoughtful manner, questioning the wisdom of wasting so much fossil fuel in transporting foreign produce to markets everywhere so that the notion of seasonality becomes almost extinct.
2605592
Annia Ciezadlo can write and I expect we will see more good writing from her in the future.  However, I'm afraid to rate this book higher because so much of what I enjoyed about it is that it reminded me of my own path of discovery of Lebanon, Middle Eastern food and the wider Middle East. I didn't buy her argument that most wars are about food---ok she actually says 'resources', and I think food is only superficially related.  My main complaint is that she so personalizes the conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon that I found it difficult to discern if a personality or event was significant in the context of the conflicts or just in Annia's relationship to it. I found it a bit concerning that someone with such limited understanding, at least early on, of the politics, culture and language was writing about it and interpreting it for newspapers in the US. I believe, however, her judgement and instincts are sound and she provides a great intro to the culture.
1014270
Adam Gopnik's latest book on French culture is a delight to read.  He understands how history  can illuminate experience, in this case, eating.  I liked this book as much for its comparative take on food literature (19th and 20th century) as much as on his critique of the culture of contemporary French cuisine.  New York French restaurants, Food TV star chefs and characters  from the world of restaurant newspaper criticism  and food movements (i.e. Fooding, Localvores, Foraging etc.) all take a turn under his pen.  He is a fine writer but why does he describe women and compare them to other women.  It's so annoying.  He doesn't describe men this way.  This kind of stuff gets in the way and I wish his editor would be a bit tougher on him...but HE probably doesn't notice.
2170100
While Susan Marks' liberal use of uppity prose in this book helped keep my mind from my lackluster summer, I don't think "Finding Betty Crocker" performs to its fullest capacity.  Marks goes to great lengths showing how Betty Crocker was a staple of '50s kitchen kitsch who served a greater purpose: helping millions of everyday women cope during the Depression and World War II. I walked away from this book with a greater understanding of why my grandmother and great-aunts spoke so fondly of their favorite anonymous homemaker. Marks' prose, however cheery, walks the fine line between nonfiction and public relations: she never mentions the role Betty Crocker and General Mills played in telling millions of U.S. housewives that culinary perfection would equal marital bliss during the mid-20th century or covering up a scientific study that showed white bread to be less healthy than perceived. If Marks had gone deeper with these issues and scrapped a 20-page chapter describing the various Betty Crocker Test Kitchens, I think this book would have been much stronger. That said, however, I could really go for some Devil's Food right now! I guess Susan has done her job.
321897
Alice Medrich proves her unparalleled expertise and unmatched resourcefulness with both sweet and savory - the dessert category and the entre category - in this, her most ambitious book in many years.  Since her youthful career start in 1974, Alice has hardly remained a mere specialty cake-maker over the last thirty years.  While a decade ago her revision of several chapters in everyone's home bible - The All-New Joy of Cooking - was plentiful enough evidence of her versatile talents, this blockbuster showcases her breadth of creativity in clarifying the latest trends and taking them the next step.  Those who have followed Alice's career know she can be wildly successful in anything culinary she sets out to do, and this volume gives fresh currency to her long-established unrivaled reputation.
Like others commenting in these columns, the biographies of culinary legends are as fascinating to me as their recipes.  In this respect, Alice's "Tales from a Life in Chocolate" fall short of the explicitness of her recipes.  Little is added to the snapshots of early career highlights repetitively recounted in earlier books and interviews.  Glimpses into her ensuing professional and personal trajectory take a tone that at first seems gracefully modest but ultimately feels distancing and condescending - in a coy "if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're not in the know" fashion.  What happened to the barely-mentioned husband who "provided the most critical support" to her famous business, Cocolat?  Half-way through the pages, he disappears - without even a few words of explanation, the reader is teased but shorted.  And who are the "we" repeatedly referenced in the episodes of career trial and triumph?  Alice can well afford to be more generous in acknowledging former employees and colleagues (many of whom have respectable culinary or allied careers of their own).  Her reticence imparts an acidic taste of stinginess - for a woman of such evident accomplishments, it's puzzling to leave such an impression of either insecurity or disdain.
No doubt Alice's life has ample substance for a really compelling memoir or collection of tales - but this first effort falls disappointingly short.  We can await with anticipation her next, hopefully even better, productions.
2539728
`The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine' by hunting and fishing sports writer, Steven Rinella is, as another reviewer points out, much less of a culinary memoir than the title may suggest, but that is not, I believe, a legitimate reason to give this memoir a low score.

I believe the really misleading aspect of this title is the word `Scavenger'. The book would have been much better served by replacing this hyena / buzzard evoking word with the more erudite term, `hunter / gatherer', which the author actually uses liberally in his text.

This book falls is less in the tradition of writings by Tony Bourdain, Jacques Pepin, or Ruth Reichl than it does the tradition of political essayist, George Orwell and his `Down and Out in Paris and London', where there are many interesting culinary observations, but the real point is much more about a lifestyle than about cooking. A minor theme of the book is a reflection of the recent culinary memoir `Julie & Julia' by Julie Powell. Instead of Julia Child, Rinella's culinary muse is the great French chef and culinary writer, Auguste Escoffier, and the inspiration is Escoffier's `Le Guide Culinaire'.

This meeting of `haute cuisine' and outdoorsman may seem odd, until Rinella reminds us that Escoffier (and most Continental chefs, even to this day) devote much of their attention to cooking with game and foraged ingredients, even if the `game' is from domestically raised bison, deer, rabbits, or fowl. In fact, this is one of two major points on which I would take issue with Rinella. The `hunter / gatherer' element in the culinary world is not nearly as isolated as he seems to indicate. It is just a lot more highly organized around collecting and marketing things like porcini, truffles, and game birds.

The second bone I have to pick with Rinella his claim that it was Escoffier which brought the Russian style of service to France and England, replacing the pre-Revolutionary French style of service. The latter put all the dishes out on the table on serving plates in what we may call `family style', and everyone picked from the service platters, at least those service platters they could reach. The former delivered to the table one course at a time, as we are familiar with in restaurants today. According to `Cooking for Kings', a biography of Antonin Careme, Ian Kelly states that Careme began introducing the Russian style of service back in the days of Napoleon. And, I suspect his introduction was hastened by the collapse of the nobility caused by the French Revolution (which simultaneously lead to the rise of restaurants, since all those chefs of noble houses had to find some gainful employment).

The similarity with Julie Powell is based on the fact that the book is organized around Rinella's preparing a massive dinner based exclusively on Escoffier's recipes for game meats.

While this book may have equal or greater appeal to outdoorsmen than to urban foodies, it is not without its culinary charms, especially in those pieces where our hero has to deal with his vegetarian girlfriend in a world of game meats and home butchering.
1909765
I first stumbled upon Anthony Bourdain's writing a couple years after his magnum opus on the food service industry,&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Kitchen-Confidential-Updated-Edition-Adventures-in-the-Culinary-Underbelly-P-S/dp/0060899220/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Kitchen Confidential Updated Edition: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.)</a>, was released and quickly became a fan of his very 70s punk view of what it's like to work the line and run a restaurant.  When I heard that he was writing his next book,&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/A-Cook-s-Tour-Global-Adventures-in-Extreme-Cuisines/dp/0060012781/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines</a>, as well as filming a television show to back it up I was very excited and intrigued by the concept.  In a nutshell, Bourdain traveled the globe stopping off in places that have either had a profound affect on him culturally (such as visiting Vietnam because of films like Apocalypse Now) or on his culinary proclivities (such as visiting the hometown of his longtime employer in Portugal or the spot of his first childhood food epiphany in France.)  Along the way he does his best to completely open himself up to any available gastronomical experiences which can at times be weird, exciting, or downright disgusting (like eating the still-beating heart of a cobra or trying barbequed lizard on a stick.)

The television series, which ran for two seasons back around the turn of the millennium, was at the time some of the most interesting programming on the Food Network focusing more on real life and a wide variety of cultural experiences (as opposed to the typical shows which center on short-cut cooking and product placement.)  Though Bourdain has a hearty sense of humor and charisma that could easily place him among the ranks of the other Food Network celebrity chefs, it quickly became clear during the second season that (which featured travel beyond the scope of the original book and concept) he was under heavy pressure from the network to "get in-line" with their outlook and direction content-wise as he was visiting places (like the Mall of America), where it's obvious he does not want to be.  Luckily, he stepped away from the show and the network and found a home elsewhere where he's free to make the content he wants to.

Pop culture-wise, this series is probably best known for introducing the public to the idea of extremely weird eating (bugs, lizards, cobras, you name it), but that's only on the surface.  The heart of the show is really about digging into other cultures and opening oneself up to trying all kinds of cuisine.

As for the DVD set, I was surprised when I found a copy up at my local Target as I thought this series was stuck in a Food Network limbo.  The packaging was alarming in it's poor production design quality, but at twenty bucks I thought it was worth a glance to see if the actually DVD picture and sound quality was decent.  Besides, I never expected the series would be released so I figured I better snag a copy before it disappeared.  All in all, it's not that bad, quality-wise, with a 8 out of 10 on picture and 7 out of 10 on sound quality.  To be honest, it's been so long since I saw it in its original run that this might be more or less how it originally aired.  My main complaint with the set is that it's presented in a six disc set that's broken up disc by disc into world regions (US, Mexico & the Americas, Europe, Morocco & Russia, Asia, and Australia & Japan) instead of being set up in either production or air-date order.  So it's hard to figure out what is the first and second season.  I guess for those really intrigued by the series it's well worth picking up the first book and doing your best to use it as a guide to the first season.
2718680
The author has a breezy, conversational style rich in creativity and wit.  I thoroughly enjoyed it as a memoir.  But I suspect that there are a few errors in some of the recipes that punctuate the chapters.  Some of the ingredient amounts and directions don't sound right. I have not compared them to those in the paperback, which was (unfortunately, IMO) retitled Starting Over from Scratch.
1748802
If you are thinking about reading this book because you want inside tales of a chef's life in the kitchen you will, no doubt, be disappointed. If you are looking for a books which is a well-written, engaging and lush memoir of a young woman whose path took her to becoming a chef/restaurant owner in New York despite a childhood which appears to have started out with a strong family background, shattering in divorce and separation from her parents, and the circumstances which developed and defined her ultimate career -- then you will no doubt enjoy this book as much as I did.  Blood, Bones and Butter is a descriptive and unsparing look at life thru the eyes of Gabrielle Hamiton.

This is an excellent, satisfying read--just park your expectations at the door and realize the purpose of the book. Too many reviewers seem to have unrealistic expectations--and write poor reviews because the book is not what they assumed it would be. This is not a behind the scenes in a restaurant memoir. It is the story of an individual's journey through life and how she wound up becoming a chef, restauranter, wife, mother. It is a personal memoir of an intriguing and interesting life.