An intimate, revealing portrait, far different from the woman blazoned in the tabloids.
In an absorbing memoir, Lakshmi (Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day, 2007, etc.), host of Top Chef, cookbook author, fashion columnist, and coveted supermodel, focuses more on love and many wrenching losses than on glamour and glitter.
Born in India, Lakshmi came to the United States when she was 4, flying alone to New York to join her mother. Although struggling financially, her mother, who reminded her that “beauty is not an accomplishment,” always managed to send the author back to India each summer, where she lived with her doting grandparents. Her family, their culture, and especially the food they shared (the book includes a few recipes) were crucial to her identity. Encouraged to work hard in school, she majored in theater arts at Clark University but had no clear career goals. She never thought she was particularly beautiful, and growing up in the U.S., she came to believe that “lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self.” Modeling happened by accident, during a stay in Europe, but once launched, Lakshmi found great success. In Europe, she embarked, also, on the first of several important relationships. The author realizes she always sought “a mentor, an older, wiser man” to make up for the absence of her own father, but it seems she was also attracted to wealth and power. Her European lover was urbane, cultivated, and rich. Later, she married Salman Rushdie, but they divorced after several rocky years. Lakshmi was intent on pursuing her TV career, while Rushdie expected her presence as he traveled the world as a literary star. Health issues also interfered: diagnosed with endometriosis, she required several surgeries during which Rushdie, self-absorbed, offered little support. Two men—a billionaire financier and philanthropist and a venture capitalist—came into her life later, one fathering her daughter.
An intimate, revealing portrait, far different from the woman blazoned in the tabloids.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-220261-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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