A flawed but intriguing project.
A Polish journalist’s account of his conversations with the personal chefs of five notorious dictators.
Szablowski (Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, 2016, etc.) became fascinated by the relationship between dictators and their cooks after watching a film featuring Yugoslavian dictator Tito’s personal chef. In a project that took several years to complete, the author traveled the world to interview the people who had cooked for Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot. Alternating between third-person reports of Szablowski’s interviews and first-person accounts from interviewees, the author shares intimate historical insights into the meaning of life under dictatorship. Szablowski begins with—and periodically revisits—a section called “Snack,” which deals with Young Moeun’s memories of a youth spent cooking for Pol Pot, whom she remembered chiefly for his good looks and gentleness. The next section, “Breakfast,” recounts conversations with Hussein’s cook, Abu Ali, who recalled his employer’s generosity and fondness for “bastirma” (dried beef). “Lunch” presents the story of Amin’s cook, Otonde Odera, who made “nutritious pilafs [and] baked fish” while also managing to survive the political intrigue that nearly cost him his life. “Dinner” focuses on Hoxha’s cook, Mr. K., who had to “cope with deficit items, unavailable in [Stalinist] Albania” while cooking meals to soothe his “agitated” boss. “Supper” deals with two of Castro’s chefs. One, Erasmo, thrived under the dictator and became a prosperous restaurateur while the other, Flores, lost his mind and ended up living in poverty. The final section, “Dessert,” continues Moeun’s complimentary musings on Pol Pot, which she intersperses with recollections of life as a member of the Cambodian Communist Party. Two strengths of Szablowski’s book are its originality and topicality in a world increasingly governed by political strongmen. However, the complex, fractured structure creates an uneven narrative that is sometimes difficult to follow.
A flawed but intriguing project.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-312975-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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