Fighting for human rights, writing the perfect poem, discovering cures for mortal diseases: these are endeavors Trillin...
The chowhound pursues soul-stirring, pulse-elevating food from one eatery to another, over many a mile.
When the times were hard, “there was nothing to do but keep eating,” writes Trillin (Tepper Isn’t Going Out, 2002, etc.) in a collection that relates to foodstuffs the way others might refer to passages from holy books. Let us give thanks to the saving graces of Chinese restaurants, from Ecuador to Nauru, Paris to Prague; to that gnarly pumpernickel bagel that might lure the writer’s daughter back to his hometown New York; to all those bistros and neighborhood markets that fill him up in ways the more famous destinations never do, those temples where he “can’t seem to help wondering, when [his] mind wanders between forkfuls, whether God really intended all that to be done to food.” Likewise, Trillin is willing to pay the dues of the pilgrim on a quest, journeying far and enduring the foul in search of the sublime—like a string of boudin, for example, proving the Cajun dictum “the best boudin is always the boudin closest to where you live” (as long as you live in Louisiana). Better yet, there’s the Cajun wisdom that says you ought to eat your purchase in the parking lot of the place you bought it in, minutes after buying. Trillin is ready to sample 20 bowls of ceviche, knowing he “would wake up the next morning feeling a bit fragile.” His Register of Frustration and Deprivation, foods he is denied because he isn’t geographically positioned to get them, is as plentiful as his turn-downs are rare: “Would it be fair to say that you’re wimping out on the guinea pig?” his daughter asks on a visit to a restaurant in Peru.
Fighting for human rights, writing the perfect poem, discovering cures for mortal diseases: these are endeavors Trillin would consider deserving of our admiration, thank you. And you can add to that “the ability to read the wall signs in Chinese restaurants.”Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50808-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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