MixedThe Wall Street JournalReichl introduces a number of Gourmet characters. She has a formula for presenting them: a name with a professional identification and then a sentence about the appearance of each. I can’t recall which was the \'tall, thin stork of a man,\' whoever had \'pale-blue eyes and windburned cheeks,\' whose \'pale, clever face was bare of makeup,\' or who was \'nicely dressed but without striking looks.\' These markers attempt a fiction-like presentation but are forgettable, as these people were to Gourmet ... [Reichl] does narrate many great scenes .... In Reichl’s terms, [the executives] \'murdered the magazine.\' This seems to me not a tale of homicide or of losing out in the evolution of the fittest. Instead, it is yet another story of the unmerited demise of the controversial and provocative.
Boris Fishman
RaveThe Philadelphia Inquirer... focused and multilayered ... Such stories of eastern European suspicion help raise the narrative from the personal to the public and historical ... Fishman’s story is also one of redemption ... Fishman’s food memoir is terrifically nuanced and multidimensional.
