About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Laurie Woolever
Rave The Washington Post ... absorbing ... Woolever’s book does a much better job [than a recent documentary] of filling the void, and she’s the ideal person to tell Bourdain’s story ... Collectively, [the interviewees\'] stories and remembrances are heartbreaking, infuriating, inspiring, damning, loving and sometimes even disorienting. We learn over the course of more than 400 pages that the portrait Bourdain painted of himself—tough, empathetic, quick-witted, curious, damaged, competitive, no-nonsense—was just a sketch. So many shadings had yet to be filled in. The transparency that Bourdain implicitly promised us through his writings and shows, we come to find out, was far more opaque ... The beauty of this book is its ability to balance joy and pain.
Kwame Onwuachi
Rave The Washington Post Onwuachi assumes nothing, understanding that seeming meritocracies can still be infected with the silent racism that holds back people of color ... Onwuachi\'s memoir should be required reading, not just for future chefs, but for anyone who wants a glimpse into one man\'s tale of what it\'s like to be young, black and ambitious in America ... In prose both hard and lyrical, we learn about Onwuachi\'s flirtation with gangs as a teen ... What’s inspiring about Onwuachi’s story is his fierce belief in himself, and his path, even as people tried to break him or shape him in their preferred image.
José Andrés with Richard Wolffe
Rave The Washington Post With We Fed an Island, chef-and-restaurateur-turned-relief worker José Andrés doesn’t just tell the story about how he and a fleet of volunteers cooked millions of meals for the Americans left adrift on Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. He exposes what he views as an outdated top-down, para-military-type model of disaster relief ... No one is spared Andrés’s critical eye, including the chef himself ... Although it contains moments of real pathos, the book is not a saccharine, self-serving tribute to the work of thousands of chefs, line cooks, food truck operators and other volunteers who heeded the call to help from Andrés’s nonprofit organization, World Central Kitchen. It’s a manifesto asking governments and nonprofit groups to rethink the way they feed people after a natural disaster ... We Fed an Island is as close to a page-turner as current-affairs nonfiction gets.