A disarmingly candid look at the highs, lows, and true grit of a culinary star.
From the acclaimed first female Iron Chef, a heartfelt memoir of a loving family, a passion for food, and the challenges of career and personal life.
After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, Cora blazed a trail for women in a field dominated by men, joining a cadre of celebrity chefs with cookbooks, TV shows, and food and cookware brands. The author describes an idyllic childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, building forts with her brothers in the “fairy-tale piney woods” behind their house. Cora, whose grandfather owned a restaurant, comes by her love of cooking naturally. From “Grandmom Alma,” who came to take care of the family while Cora’s mother was away getting her doctorate, Cora learned to make the creamiest of cheesecakes. Her parents had a passion for food and entertaining, serving such dishes as her father’s Greek kota kapama. This near-perfect childhood was marred when a son of family friends sexually abused her. The abuse stopped when her parents found out, but it was years before they acknowledged the deep trauma it caused, thinking she was young and would get over it. Instead, she was haunted by guilt and shame well into her adult life. Cora draws readers into her world with frank, conversational writing. What the prose lacks in style is overcome by the strength of her story. She recounts her family’s support but also their fears for her when she came out as a lesbian in the conservative South. Driven and ambitious, she went from culinary school to apprenticeships at Michelin-starred restaurants in France and from sous and executive chef positions in increasingly prestigious restaurants to a Food Network regular. Career demands took a toll on her personal life. Along with success came some heartache, until she found a balance with her spouse and their four sons, realizing at last that she didn’t have to be perfect.
A disarmingly candid look at the highs, lows, and true grit of a culinary star.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6614-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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