MixedThe Guardian (UK)... an engrossing, penetrating, but often bleak book whose candour crosses the line into something uncomfortable. For example, Leerhsen uses Bourdain’s final messages with Asia Argento, the Italian actor with whom he had an unhappy and increasingly one-sided romance at the time of his death, as an epigraph, which feels tasteless ... Leerhsen, who has a background in magazine writing, approaches biography not as a dry accumulation of facts but as something ruminative, chatty, and essayistic. He’s a stylist with a knack for winding sentences, and a nice eye, or ear, for the vivid ... For all its perceptiveness, Down and Out in Paradise is marred by its tendency to constantly tie Bourdain’s life to the circumstances of his death: the book returns frequently to the subject, constantly foreshadows it, and closes, somewhat abruptly, with his funeral. That short-changes Bourdain. His suicide may have been the final act of his life, but it was hardly, by a long shot, the most interesting.
