MixedThe New York Times Book Review... enters a bloated genre that has a high bar. Is his eating life so distinctive that it stands out from all the other writers’ and warrants expansive narration? The answer is yes and no. I kept wishing he’d teased out more themes — beyond, simply, his gusto — to tie together his days as an Italian-American boy whose lunchbox shamed his classmates’ and his international jaunts as a movie star who judges locations based on the quality of food in and around the set ... Absent that connective tissue, Taste at times seems less like a labor of love than an exercise in brand extension. Tucci has, in collaboration with family members, produced cookbooks ... The most striking aspect of Taste is its curiously handled twist. Just 28 pages before the end of the book, he flashes back from scenes of pandemic tedium in 2020 to announce that in 2017, he was diagnosed with tongue cancer and subsequently went through a brutal regimen of radiation that obliterated his appetite for a while ... made me wonder why he didn’t begin his book with the tumor and the possibility that, even if he survived it, he’d be robbed of culinary pleasure forevermore. (Fortunately, he wasn’t.) As a framing device, that would have added poignancy and urgency to the meals that followed. As an abrupt development near the book’s end, it is disorienting — though still harrowing ... I enjoyed eavesdropping in its early pages on a loud and food-proud Italian American family much like my own ... the tour itself is a bit of a jumble. He toggles breezily between passages told in straightforward prose and anecdotes rendered in movie-script dialogue; between lessons on the composition of a particular pasta dish and mini-tutorials on important culinary figures; between recipes, menus and timelines; between salty language and fussy references. It’s easily digested but undercooked. And it may leave you feeling slightly underfed ... asks for your time and attention and yet, in a manner too common among memoirs by celebrities wary of the public eye, holds you at something of a remove ... Tucci at one point apologizes for his high-level name-dropping, but he needn’t. It’s a spice that most of the \'What I Ate\' books don’t have.
Claire Messud
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewOur Dogs is one of about 25 essays in Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, and it’s in many ways emblematic — the elegance of it, the challenge of it. Messud isn’t a writer who grabs her subject matter by the throat or pumps her prose full of kinetic energy. She moseys, she circles, she lies in wait. She sighs where others might scream, mists up where others might sob, ponders \'holistic foulness\' where others might just run for the cleaner-smelling hills ... But more often than not, it works. There’s usually a moral in her sights, one worth getting to, and there’s sometimes a deceptively strong current of feeling beneath a surface of reserve. I didn’t gobble these essays down, as I would a bucket of buttered popcorn. I savored them in unhurried spoonfuls, as with a bowl of glistening consommé. And I felt amply fed ... These essays don’t carry the same weight or deliver the same punch [as Open City demonstrates her great talent for enlarging the context of whatever she’s writing about and weaving in astute bits of broader commentary. It also captures her determinedly elevated tone and vocabulary, which won’t be to every reader’s taste ... The ending of her take on The Door demonstrates her even greater talent for bringing her essays to a poignant, haunting close, with a few final phrases that distill the meaning of all that preceded them and send a kind of shudder through your mind and heart. If she were a gymnast, she’d be renowned for sticking her landings ... That’s why Messud writes. It gives the past a future.
