Library's review
I've long been intrigued by Julia Child and not only because we share a name. I grew up watching her cook on public television, and her high-pitched, warbly fluting voice (a result of unusually long vocal cords, Spitz reveals) and her tall (6 feet 3 inches tall), ramrod-straight
What I didn't grasp at the time, of course, was just how revolutionary she was. She along with James Beard revolutionized the way Americans look at food and food preparation — not to mention public television itself, which was in its infancy when her show, The French Chef began airing in 1963. That and her seminal cookbook [Mastering the Art of French Cooking] were unlike anything that had ever been seen before in this country. And to think she didn't even embark on that career until she was in her 40s.
Fair warning: This is a huge book, more than 700 pages when you include the acknowledgments, notes, index, etc. But it is not at all a slow read. The first 450 pages especially just flew by. I hated having to stop reading to go to work in the morning, and could not wait to get back to it at night. Author Spitz takes us from pre-birth to death with the amazing Julia, and you'd be hard-pressed to think of anything he left out.
It turns out that the outgoing personality we saw on TV was the real Julia: She was always gregarious, prone to troublemaking as a child, and fearless. But she didn't know what she wanted her life's work to be — it was easier for her to figure out what she didn't want to be, which was a conventional housewife. In the 1930s, that was a tall order. Before she latched on to cooking as her life's work (that happened when she and her husband were posted to Paris after World War II), she had a whole other career as a senior civilian intelligence officer with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA) during World War II, posted first in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then China and was in charge of processing and routing all the intelligence reports coming in from the field of the Pacific theater. Even so, she chafed against what she thought of as "filing, filing, filing" and still longed for more.
I was pleased to read in the acknowledgments that Spitz knew Julia Child personally, having accompanied her to Sicily on a trip while he was profiling her for a magazine. And she knew of his intention to write a biography of her and planned to assist him, although she died before that collaboration got off the ground. Still, Spitz interviewed many of the prominent people in the Childs' life and made extensive use of primary sources such as letters and other documents that Julia donated to the archives at Harvard University. The book is well-grounded in evidence-based fact, and he makes no attempt to sugarcoat or gloss over some of the more difficult elements in Julia's life or personality.
The only quibble I could make is that the tone is a bit too breezy and gee-whiz for my taste. He could have reduced his exclamation-point usage by one-third and still expressed an appropriate amount of enthusiasm, for example. And he occasionally got fixated on certain words or phrases that made the reading a bit odd, like "finchy," which seems to mean "touchy or sensitive" about something or someone. Again and again he refers to "Paul's finchy nature" and "audiences were particularly finchy when it came to drinking alcohol" and women who were "finchy types with degrees in stupefying disciplines." I don't really know what the word means because it's not in any dictionary I've consulted. It was a weird tic but not enough to mar enjoyment of the book overall.
Julia Child, for all her patrician accent and affinity for France, was as American as apple pie. Her life story is an amazing journey, one that I think would be enjoyed even by people who have never contemplated the proper way to bone a duck or what the "correct" types of fish are for true bouillabaisse.
Bon appétit!
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Biography & Autobiography. Cooking & Food. History. Nonfiction. HTML:Itâ??s rare for someone to emerge in America who can change our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture. Itâ??s even rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV station. And yet, thatâ??s exactly what Julia Child did. The warble-voiced doyenne of television cookery became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule-breaker as she touched off the food revolution that has gripped America for more than fifty years. Now, in Bob Spitzâ??s definitive, wonderfully affectionate biography, the Julia we know and love comes vividly â?? and surprisingly â?? to life. In Dearie, Spitz employs the same skill he brought to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book The Beatles, providing a clear-eyed portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential Americans of our time â?? a woman known to all, yet known by only a few. At its heart, Dearie is a story about a womanâ??s search for her own unique expression. Julia Child was a directionless, gawky young woman who ran off halfway around the world to join a spy agency during World War II. She eventually settled in Paris, where she learned to cook and collaborated on the writing of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book that changed the food culture of America. She was already fifty when The French Chef went on the air â?? at a time in our history when women werenâ??t making those leaps. Julia became the first educational TV star, virtually launching PBS as we know it today; her marriage to Paul Child formed a decades-long love story that was romantic, touching, and quite extraordinary. A fearless, ambitious, supremely confident woman, Julia took on all the pretensions that embellished tony French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for everything that has happened since in American cooking, from TV dinners and Big Macs to sea urchin foam and the Food Channel. Julia Childâ??s story, however, is more than the tale of a talented woman and her sumptuous craft. It is also a saga of Americaâ??s coming of age and growing sophistication, from the Depression Era to the turbulent sixties and the excesses of the eighties to the greening of the American kitchen. Julia had an effect on and was equally affected by the baby boom, the sexual revolution, and the start of the womenâ??s liberation movement. On the centenary of her birth, Julia finally gets the biography she richly deserves. An in-depth, intimate narrative, full of fresh information and insights, Dearie is an entertaining, all-out adventure story of one of ou… (more)