An intriguing premise marred by an uneven delivery.
Freelance reporter Badkhen attempts to wrap her many war-zone experiences around the framework of food.
Born in the Soviet Union, the author has traveled to numerous combat zones, braving the shooting, shelling, highway robbery and inebriated officers to get her stories. Amid the chaos, fear, disease and privation, the author managed to have some fine, though not necessarily lavish, meals with people she came to call friends—examples of “the myriad brazen, congenial, persistent ways in which life in the most forlorn and violent places on earth shamelessly reasserts itself.” In this debut memoir, the author recounts these meals and the circumstances surrounding them. Borsch in Russia, lamb kebab in Afghanistan, dolma in Iraq—these meals seemed to shape Badkhen’s experiences just as much as the horror and destruction of the areas she visited. Though the author provides some cultural insights, the food connection is tenuous, as the meals she discusses feel like asides or afterthoughts to the experiences and the people involved. The chapter on borsch, for example, focuses almost entirely on the Russian government’s response to Chechen rebel activities, mentioning borsch as one constant in the lives of a people continually betrayed by their government. The philosophical connection is interesting, but the food tie-in is more of a random analogy spread across a more compelling discussion about how Russia treats its people. This recurs throughout the book, resulting in a narrative sprinkled with absorbing observations but ultimately made less cohesive by its primary theme.
An intriguing premise marred by an uneven delivery.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6648-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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