Review by New York Times Review
ALI: A Life, by Jonathan Eig. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) The first full biography of Ali since his death last year, Eig's richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time. FRANCE IS A FEAST: The Photographic Journey of Paul and Julia Child, by Alex Prud'homme and Katie Pratt. (Thames & Hudson, $35.) Paul Child was an accomplished photographer, as this handsome selection of images from the Childs' life in post-World War II France makes plain. RUTHLESS RIVER: Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon's Relentless Madre de Dios, by Holly FitzGerald. (Vintage, paper, $16.) A riveting account of a "dream honeymoon" in South America gone very wrong, starting with a plane crash and ending with a near-death experience deep in the jungle. Stranded 26 days, the author and her husband somehow retain hope and affection. THE TASTE OF EMPIRE: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, by Lizzie Collingham. (Basic Books, $32.) Through the clever re-creation of 20 meals, consumed over the centuries and in various locales, a social historian illuminates the influence of apparently mundane habits. STICKY FINGERS: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, by Joe Hagan. (Knopf, $29.95.) Hagan paints the rogue's life of the Rolling Stone co-founder with a brush made of stinging nettles, making excellent use of the extensive interviews and archival materials Wenner gave him. IMPROVEMENT, by Joan Silber. (Counterpoint, $26.) Disparate lives in disparate places intersect in this novel, which revolves around a single mother whose boyfriend enlists her in a scheme to smuggle cigarettes across state lines. With consummate skill, Silber reveals surprising connections between characters in contemporary New York and 1970s Turkey. LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) Isaacson, the biographer of innovators and inventors, turns to the original genius, the Renaissance man whose artistic and mechanical talents still invoke awe, in a book tracing the connections between Leonardo's art and his contemplation of nature. AMERICAN WOLF: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, by Nate Blakeslee. (Crown, $28.) The story of one wolf's struggle to survive in the majestic Yellowstone National Park offers an ambitious look through the eyes of an endangered animal. THE GIRL WHO SAVED CHRISTMAS, by Matt Haig. Illustrated by Chris Mould. (Knopf, $17.99. Ages 7 and up.) If Roald Dahl and Charles Dickens cooked up a Christmas tale, it might resemble this spry story of Victorian London (with cameos by Dickens himself). The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Prud'homme, Paul Child's great-nephew and coauthor of Julia Child's memoir, My Life in France (2006), and Pratt, who grew up as a close family friend of the Childs, collaborate in celebration of Paul's photography. A globe-trotting autodidact with a love for food and art and 10 years her senior, Paul met Julia while they both worked for the OSS in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1944. After the war, the Childs lived in France and Germany for Paul's postings with the U.S. Foreign Service, where Paul pursued his passion for taking photos in his off-hours while Julia famously began her culinary journey. Julia's success brought her into the limelight and began a reversal of the Henry Higgins-Eliza Doolittle order of their marriage. Combining narratives about Paul, Julia, and their life together with pages upon pages of Paul's personal, sensitive, and highly aesthetic black-and-white photos, the authors contribute Paul's formidable photography to which he devoted time, talent, and intellect to the collective memory of an enduringly iconic chef and a fascinating American couple.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Comprised of 225 black-and-white photographs by Paul Child, the husband of Julia Child, taken during the couple's time in France beginning in 1948, this intimate photo album delivers mesmerizing visual addenda to Julia Child's memoir, My Life in France. Paul, a career diplomat who later served as photographer for his wife's TV series, rarely left the house without at least one camera and produced an impressive number of photos, of which only a fraction are reproduced in these pages. Zeroing in on postwar Paris, the book covers the couple's early years in France and yields a unique perspective on postwar Europe as well as on the backstory of the woman whose name is synonymous with French cuisine in 20th-century America. The collection includes photos of Julia's days at the Cordon Bleu with fellow chefs, as well as snapshots of her at work amid pots and pans in the tiny kitchen of the couple's Paris apartment. In other photos, Paul plays with shadows and angles while shooting the streets of Paris or the fields of the French countryside. There are also the more everyday traveler's shots featuring a leggy Julia that illuminate the love story between the photographer and his muse. This thoroughly delicious book illustrates how two creative minds can impact public taste. Photos. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This visual journey is told by Prud'homme, great-nephew of Paul Child and coauthor of Julia Child's My Life in France, and Pratt, a photo curator whose parents were close to the Childs. Though the focus of the book is Paul's photography, it feels more like a biography of the couple than an artist catalog. Their time in Paris, from 1948 to 1953, encompasses half the work. Here, Julia discovers French cuisine; it would be more than a decade later that her first book, The Art of French Cooking, would launch her career. A year in Marseille and an examination of Paul's earlier years complete the text. Though carefully composed and with a photographer's keen eye, Paul's black-and-white photos better serve to illustrate the personal stories of the couple's adventures rather than to stand alone as an artist's work. More than 200 images of architecture and city street life are shown alongside pictures of Julia and their friends. VERDICT Fans of Julia Child will certainly enjoy this intimate view of the French Chef and her earliest years in the kitchen. Photographers may appreciate Paul Child's work as it captures midcentury France with charming simplicity.-Shannon Marie Robinson, Drexel Univ. Libs., Philadelphia © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
