Synopsis This book of memoirs by Richard Olney, the American cooking writer who died in 1999, is full of anecdotes about his friends both inside and out the cooking world, such as James Baldwin and James Beard, and his life in Provence, where he cooked, wrote, and painted.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1998-08-01 | | Edition Description: | Illustrated |
| Size | | Length: | 416 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 28.8 oz |
Industry Reviews "Chronological and uncreative in structure, REFLEXIONS is also, sadly, wildly uneven. Some sections are downright brilliant; others read as if they had been dictated and printed without a second look from anyone....Olney's story should have been absorbing from start to finish. As it stands, those who want or need to know about an important part of food writing history will find more than enough to maintain their attention. Casual readers, however, will probably drop out after a couple of hundred pages." New York Times Book Review - Mark Bittman (04/23/2000)
"It isn't as if the rewards aren't there--the book is studded with passages of brilliantly evocative prose....Also, anyone with a taste for food-world gossip will find they can stuff themselves to surfeit here....The problem is that about a third of the way through the book, it seems he was no longer able to continue the hard--but up to then very successful--work of recasting raw experience into carefully considered prose....At that point, he begins cobbling the rest of the book together by taking excerpts from his copious stash of letters and connecting them...." Simple Cooking - John Thorne
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