A delectable feast of the heart.
A professor and journalist’s engaging account of how being an urban forager in New York City led her to unexpected personal enlightenment.
As a child growing up in 1970s Queens, New York Times “Wild Edibles” columnist Chin (Creative Nonfiction/CUNY; Split: Stories from a Generation Raised on Divorce, 2002) loved nothing better than to root around in the soil near her single mother’s apartment or savor the delicious foods her Chinese-born grandfather prepared in his kitchen. Yet the “lessons on life” she learned came from neither her mother nor her grandfather. Instead, they came from a feisty, loving grandmother who helped Chin weather painful emotional storms that resulted from rocky parental and romantic relationships. By the time Chin reached her late 30s, she turned her early love of digging in the dirt into a serious interest in urban foraging. The deeper she ventured into her interests, however, the more her grandmother’s health, and the author’s personal life, began to decline. Faced with the loss of the woman who had taken “the place of mother in [her] heart” and the possibility of permanent singledom, Chin began reflecting on her life and the people in it. She and her often self-absorbed mother “acted as if…there was never enough time or love or money to go around to sustain us.” Yet the natural world was a place of abundance where all things were possible, and while life was a series of stages that eventually culminated in death, to appreciate it meant seeing all things as attempts to cope with the at-times hostile “wilderness of the city.” As she hunted the urban wilds of NYC for motherwort, mulberries and mushrooms, Chin not only cultivated acceptance, but also discovered an even more tantalizing prize: love. Interspersed throughout with delicious urban forager recipes, Chin’s book delights as it informs and inspires.
A delectable feast of the heart.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5619-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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