The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
“Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (is) a British food celebrity. He is forty-two, principally a journalist and television host by trade, who wears inexpensive horn-rimmed glasses so familiar to his British audience that they are now a piece of instant anti-branding branding. The look, like his dress (muddy Wellington boots, soiled linen jacket, the mess of the occasional [...]
My Life in France, by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme
“Without her we wouldn’t have Rachel Ray, Nigella Lawson, or the Jamie Oliver. We wouldn’t have the French cooking bible, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Without her, Bon Appetite would not be in the pop culture lexicon. My Life in France tells the story of how the inspiration epicure, Julia Child, was born.’ Read [...]
Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home, by Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich
“In his eccentric and often affecting memoir “Tastes Like Cuba,” Machado, a noted Cuban-American playwright, tells the story of his rootless, self-invented life, using food as his connecting thread. After his grandfather boasts that his arroz con pollo “will taste just like Cuba,” Machado thinks: “How do you make a meal taste like a place? [...]
Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, by Dean Wareham
“Dean Wareham was the guitarist for Galaxie 500, a much-loved indie trio whose droning atmospherics and oblique lyrics owed as much to Dadaist prose as they did to the Velvet Underground. The indie-rock world of the late ’80s and early ’90s now seems as distant as only the recent past can. Wareham’s memoir of the [...]
There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese
“Now, in a book written, according to its title page, “with” Roy Abraham Varghese - of whom more later - Flew tells the story of his “discovery of the divine.” This sounds like a victory for the faithful in the God wars: a welcome riposte to the atheist tomes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and [...]
Riding Toward Everywhere by William T. Vollman
“Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may be warranted,” William T. Vollman concedes in the first chapter of “Riding Toward Everywhere” (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $26.95), his account of train-hopping in the contemporary American West. He knows that a fortunate man who does for kicks what a less fortunate man does out of desperation is suspect, [...]
Riding Toward Everywhere, by William T. Vollmann
“If trains, connoting the eternally expanding frontier, have long served as a potent symbol for our fair nation, then trainhopping represents an outlaw strain of the American dream. William T. Vollmann must know this, because in Riding Toward Everywhere, his part-memoir, part-report, full-on paean to trainhopping, he hardly goes five pages without affirming that dangerous, [...]