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Artisanal Cooking: A Chef Shares His Passion for Handcrafting Great Meals at Home by Terrance Brennan
A review by Georgie Lewis
The subtitle of Artisanal Cooking is a fairly typical one: A Chef Shares his Passion for Handcrafting Great Meals at Home. And yet I couldn't have said it better, "sharing" being the perfect word to describe the inclusiveness one feels reading Chef Terrance Brennan's recipes. Brennan introduces the book with his philosophy of artisanal cooking -- incidentally Artisanal is the name of one of his famous New York restaurants (the other being Picholine), and the name of his Premium Cheese Company (www.artisanalcheese.com). To Brennan artisanal is not just "handcrafted" food, but connotes...
The Prince of the City by Fred Siegel
Incomplete Guide
A review by Reihan Salam
If his writing is any guide, Fred Siegel is a fighting liberal of the best kind -- tough-minded yet compassionate, fiercely opposed to demagoguery of any stripe, ever mindful of self-serving hypocrisy, and deeply knowledgeable. For that reason alone, his work is indispensable. As an unabashed urban romantic, Siegel's rage at urban decline has resonance. He never bashes the great cities. He agonizes over the slow destruction of what had been a uniquely rewarding way of life. So why has Siegel written such a conventional and uninspired hagiography of one of the most puzzling, infuriating...
Who's Your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great, and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly
A review by Georgie Lewis
Golf and I have managed to co-exist without ever having anything to do with each other. To confess, I don't think I would ever have picked up Rick Reilly's book except that the title and cover seemed so…goofy. I opened it out of readerly contrariness. Oh — and there was a chapter on Bob Newhart, whom I adore. And so I read the chapter on Bob and found myself treated to a loving character profile as well as a fascinating walk around the Bel-Air golf club, whose legendary members provide colorful anecdotes related by Reilly in snappy prose. I went on to read another chapter, about a...
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Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
In "Saints," A Straight-Edge Coming Of Age
A review by Phoebe Connelly
On Aug. 6, 1988, a collection of squatters, anarchists and youths took over Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's East Village to protest a new 1 a.m. curfew. By the time the fated hour rolled around, the gathering had turned violent as police attempted to shut down the park. The crowd was there to protect a neighborhood where, as Eleanor Henderson puts it in Ten Thousand Saints, "there were shadows to hide in. Here you didn't advertise being gay or straight or rich or poor; you just tried not to get your ass kicked." Injuries and reports of police brutality abounded. Henderson picked this...
Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett
A review by Bruce Allen
In her latest collection of short stories Andrea Barrett continues a preoccupation with scientific themes adumbrated in her novels Lucid Stars (1988) and The Forms of Water (1993), one that didn't fully emerge until her National Book Award-winning collection Ship Fever (1996). That volume's carefully studied, densely detailed accounts of the romance and the trauma of scientific discovery displayed a mastery of the difficult art of organizing and communicating forbidding narrative material, which reached even more impressive heights in The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), in effect a modern...
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt
The Reminder-General
A review by Stefan Collini
"The past has nothing of interest to teach us." That, fears Tony Judt, is the presiding assumption of the early twenty-first century. The speed of social and economic change, the exhaustion of the twentieth century's dominant ideologies and a desire to put the horrors of that century's carnage behind us all conspire, he believes, to encourage a culture of forgetting. And this belief frames and justifies his sense of his own role; he appoints himself the Reminder-General in contemporary society (or at least in the United States), a particular version of the historian as public intellectual. ...
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