RaveBrevityKaren Babine writes the way she cooks: with a fierce and stubborn tenderness, with passion and precision, savoring each nuance and detail. She cooks, and writes, with the steadiness and strength of someone in full command of both her kitchen and her craft. In Babine’s second book, she has woven these threads together so deftly that it becomes difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to tease them apart. Part meditation, part memoir, part philosophical assay, this collection explores the ways in which we try to nourish, heal, and keep each other whole ... Babine uses cooking, and cookware, as both metaphor and springboard, leaping from the material to the spiritual and back again with remarkable ease ... a far-ranging and thoughtful collection in which the author touch on topics as seemingly disparate as wild rice and the health of the environment, politics and the malleability of certain types of dough, somehow finding the thread that connects the literal to the abstract, the small to the mighty, the microcosm of her kitchen to the larger world ... This slender, densely packed collection is haunted, but never overpowered, by an acute anticipatory grief.
Zack McDermott
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMcDermott’s glorious Gorilla and the Bird is one of the best memoirs I’ve read in years. The sheer, sharp pleasure of his prose is reason enough to pick it up ...though sure to be marketed as a mental health memoir, is equally a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita, Kan. ... McDermott gives us a flawed, funny, self-aware narrator with a powerful command of his own voice; he can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath. While he sustains his pell-mell pace from the first page to the last, he also covers an enormous amount of territory... With deceptive effortlessness, this book carries the reader through both the peculiar twists and turns of a bipolar mind, and over some complex, shifting terrain in ethics and American life.
