With this stunning memoir of growing up in Italian-American New Jersey, Louise DeSalvo proves that your family's past is baked right into the bread you eat.In Louise DeSalvo's family, in 1950s New Jersey, the kitchen becomes the site for fierce generational battle. As Louise's step-grandmother stubbornly recreates the domestic habits of her Southern Italian peasant upbringing, she clashes painfully with Louise's convenience-food-loving mother, who is set on total Americanization. Louise, meanwhile, dreams of the day when in her own kitchen she'll produce perfect fresh pasta or pan-seared pork chops with fennel. But as Louise grows up to indulge in the kind of amazing food her impoverished ancestors could never have imagined and travels to Italy herself, her adult discoveries give her new insight into the tensions of her childhood. In unearthing the oppressive conditions that led Southern Italians to emigrate en masse to the United States, gaining a subtler understanding of the struggles between her parents and their parents, and starting a more happily food-obsessed family of her own, Louise DeSalvo arrives at a fuller and more compassionate picture of her own roots. And, in the process, she reveals that our image of the festive and bounteous Italian-American kitchen may exist in part to mask a sometimes painful history.

Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

Louise DeSalvo

Bloomsbury Pub. Ltd. (UK)

<p>"For fifty years, Jack Kirby drew more pages than any other comic book artist. As talented as he was prolific, Kirby was responsible for many of the best-known and most beloved superheroes in popular culture." "With his first writing partner, Joe Simon, he created Captain America, DC Comic's Sandman, and the lucrative genre of the romance comic. In the 1960s, Kirby paired with Stan Lee to develop a pantheon of heroes that included, among others, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers, and the Silver Surfer." "Together with Lee, this artist and writer forever changed the American comic book by introducing angst-ridden heroes, sympathetic villains, an a dynamic visual style that has influenced every artist who followed." In Tales to Astonish, Ronin Ro chronicles Kirby's poverty-stricken origins in New York's Lower East Side, his early commercial triumphs and failures, his renowned partnership with Stan Lee, his continuing artistic innovations, and his lengthy legal battles with Marvel Comics over the ownership of his original art. A portrait of one of its most enduring - and overlooked - artists, Tales to Astonish is also an account of the comic book industry, from its inauspicious origins to its sensational successes.</p>

Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and the American Comic Book Revolution

Ronin Ro

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain

Doodaaa: The Balletic Art of Gavin Twinge

Ralph Steadman, the creator of his own inimitable visions of Freud, Dante, Orwell, Alice and the Great Gonzo, now offers the (auto)biography of his artistic alter ego, the redoubtable Gavin Twinge. Twinge, last remnant of a nineteenth-century 'domestic engineering' dynasty, founder of the DOODAAA school, and pioneer of Barcode Art, Shredded Literature and Aerial Abstracts, is the original angry voice of contemporary art. The question Steadman sets out to answer is: Who hurt Gavin into art? Was it his mother, who fought in the Spanish Civil War? Or Gavin's travelling salesman 'father'? Or indeed, his biological father, the little-known Beat poet Howell Northern? Or Silas Gonad, the sinister doctor who attended at his birth? Or the art establishment itself? From the moment Steadman first meets Twinge, it becomes his quest to get to the heart of the mystery. Whether he has to penetrate the deep south of the South of France by London taxi, where Gavin finds inspiration with his fellow Doodaaists or witness the creation of the banned installation 'The Philosophyof French Plumbing', Steadman sticks by his man, matching him drink.

Literature & Fiction

RALPH STEADMAN

Contemporary

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