Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home
Author: Kim Sune
Already hailed as "brave, emotional, and gorgeously written" by Frances Mayes and "like a piece of dark chocolate--bittersweet, satisfying, and finished all too soon" by Laura Fraser, author of An Italian Affair, this is a unique memoir about the search for identity through love, hunger, and food.
Jim Harrison says, "TRAIL OF CRUMBS reminds me of what heavily costumed and concealed waifs we all are. Kim Sunée tells us so much about the French that I never learned in 25 trips to Paris, but mostly about the terrors and pleasure of that infinite octopus, love. A fine book."
When Kim Sunée was three years old, her mother took her to a marketplace, deposited her on a bench with a fistful of food, and promised she'd be right back. Three days later a policeman took the little girl, clutching what was now only a fistful of crumbs, to a police station and told her that she'd been abandoned by her mother.
Fast-forward almost 20 years and Kim's life is unrecognizable. Adopted by a young New Orleans couple, she spends her youth as one of only two Asian children in her entire community. At the age of 21, she becomes involved with a famous French businessman and suddenly finds herself living in France, mistress over his houses in Provence and Paris, and stepmother to his eight year-old daughter.
Kim takes readers on a lyrical journey fromKorea to New Orleans to Paris and Provence, along the way serving forth her favorite recipes. A love story at heart, this memoir is about the search for identity and a book that will appeal to anyone who is passionate about love, food, travel, and the ultimate search for self.
Publishers Weekly
On making Sunée's acquaintance in the introduction to this charming memoir, it's hard not to envy the young woman swimming laps in the pool overlooking the orchard of her petit ami's vast compound in the High Alps of Provence, but below the surface of this portrait is a turbulent quest for identity. Abandoned at age three in a Korean marketplace, Sunée is adopted by an American couple who raise her in New Orleans. In the 1990s she settles, after a fashion, in France with Olivier Baussan, a multimillionaire of epicurean tastes and-at least in her depiction-controlling disposition. She struggles to create a home for herself in the kitchen, cooking gargantuan meals for their large circle of friends, until her restive nature and Baussan's impatience with her literary ambitions compel her to move on. The gutsy Cajun and ethereal French recipes that serve as chapter codas are matched by engaging storytelling. Alas, for all Sunée's preoccupation with the geography of home, her insights on the topic are disappointingly slight, and the facile wrapup offered in the form of resolution seems a shortcut in a book that traverses so much rocky terrain. (Jan.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Kirkus Reviews
A restless young woman's poignant search for identity, accompanied by dozens of recipes. The founding food editor of Cottage Living magazine, Sunee was abandoned in a South Korean market at age three, adopted by a young American couple and raised in New Orleans. Uncertain of her exact age and ethnicity, she describes herself as a fish swimming upstream, someone who has been lost her whole life. She moved to Europe in her early 20s and met a wealthy French businessman, Olivier, who took over her life. He was older, not quite divorced and-though Sunee doesn't use the words-clearly a control freak. As Olivier's mistress, she wanted for nothing-except independence and her own identity. He planned all the details of their lives, arranged their travels and chose their friends. She tried to mother his young daughter and prepared sumptuous meals for his frequent guests. Almost every chapter ends with at least one and sometimes three or four recipes: crab, crawfish and po-boy sandwiches she learned to make from her New Orleans grandfather; directions for kimchi, a Korean salad; and many French dishes, including gratin de salsify, creme caramel and figs roasted in red wine with cream and honey. (Recipes may or may not be linked to the chapter that precedes them.) Sunee eventually left Olivier, lived alone and supported herself in Paris. She made her own friends and had an unhappy love affair, again with a married man. The mouthwatering recipes taper off at this point in her memoir, but there is still much about food and drink. The author closely observes and skillfully records all the nuances of texture, color, aroma and taste. From the crumbs in the fist of an abandoned three-year-old to bowls ofrichly sauced pasta, her text chronicles the entwining of food with security and love. At the end, Sunee is still restless, still seeking, still hungry. Vivid writing-and an inspiration to head to the kitchen.
Books about: Information Technology or The Human Venture
Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World
Author: Lawrence Osborn
What is taste? Is it individual or imposed on us from the outside? Why are so many of us so intimidated when presented with the wine list at a restaurant? In The Accidental Connoisseur, journalist Lawrence Osborne takes off on a personal voyage through a little-known world in pursuit of some answers. Weaving together a fantastic cast of eccentrics and obsessives, industry magnates and small farmers, the author explores the way technological change, opinionated critics, consumer trends, wheelers and dealers, trade wars, and mass market tastes have made the elixir we drink today entirely different from the wine drunk by our grandparents.In his search for wine that is a true expression of the place that produced it, Osborne takes the reader from the high-tech present to the primitive past. From a lavish lunch with wine tsar Robert Mondavi to the cellars of Marquis Piero Antinori in Florence, from the tasting rooms of Chateau Lafite to the humble vineyards of northern Lazio, Osborne winds his way through Renaissance palaces, $27 million wineries, tin shacks and garages, opulent restaurants, world-famous chais and vineyards, renowned villages and obscure landscapes, as well as the great cities which are the temples of wine consumption: New York, San Francisco, Paris, Florence, and Rome. On the way, we will be shown the vast tapestry of this much-desired, little-understood drink: who produces it and why, who consumes it, who critiques it'Enchanting, delightful, entertaining, and, above all, down to earth, this is a wine book like no other.
The New York Times
The Accidental Connoisseur is a vital book for those who care about wine; who find hyperventilated discussions of microscopic differences between hundreds of essentially identical wines to be little more than scholastic quibbling about how many angels can dance on the top of a cork; who see the quasi religion that raises wine to the status of a Holy Grail promising ineffable pleasure to be in reality a mercenary and joyless cult, which stuffs the mad delights of Dionysus into a neo-Puritan brown bag.
Osborne is a new voice in the wine world, smart, generous, perceptive, funny, sensible, free of cant and arrogance and self-interest. It's about time. ''Great Wine Writing'' just got a good deal thicker. —
Peter Singer Publishers Weekly
The number of serious wine books published in recent years can be counted on one hand-which makes Osborne's funny and erudite tale all the more welcome. Structured as a traditional quest, it stems from an insecurity of the author's English childhood: "I do not trust my own taste." So he embarks, Quixote-like, on 11 adventures in the wine world, jetting from France to California, then Italy, hoping to plumb the mystery of why someone would spend $600 on a bottle of fermented grape juice. At every step, Osborne, who's written for the New York Times Magazine, Lingua Franca and other publications, trains his reporter's eye-previously honed in books like American Normal-on both the big picture and telling details. At a comical lunch with viniculture icon Robert Mondavi, Osborne swiftly gets at the importance of his contribution to the industry, while also squeezing in the apt observation that Mondavi's wife, Margrit, reminds him of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, "at once coquettish and dominant." Despite the miles logged, Osborne's journey is primarily an intellectual one, and his writing will be appreciated by high-minded readers: "Wine is always the lightning conductor of an irrepressible and often iniquitous cosmopolitanism." By the last chapter, Osborne can't say exactly what Chateau Lafite Rothschild tasted like, and he has just encountered the foulest bottle of his life. But he also sounds strangely contented, because he's found the rare world where aesthetics still matter-even if the terminology and the people who employ it can be maddening. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Like many people, freelance journalist Osborne (American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome) lacks confidence in his ability to assess the varied characteristics of wine. Accordingly, he set out to explore these mysteries and records his findings here. His odyssey takes him from Italy to California to France and back, interviewing vintners as diverse as Robert Mondavi of Napa and independent winemaker Pierre Siri of Bordeaux. He learns that wine should have layers of flavor (often detectable only by super-sensitive palates); terroir, with flavors echoing the soil that produced the grapes; and intensity and subtlety. In the end, it also comes down to a bit of serendipity. Osborne's flowery writing style demands patient readers and detracts from his findings. His real strength lies in the passionate discussions with winemakers and growers. An additional purchase for larger public libraries.-Andrea Dietze, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A wide-ranging journalist/author takes to the oenophile road. "Is there anything better than drinking?" Osborne (The Poisoned Embrace, 1993, etc.) asks. "When the happiness of drinking overwhelms you, you cannot resist it." But Osborne felt terribly self-conscious about drinking wine, wondering whether his choices were the promptings of others or the authentic response of his tongue to something good. Wanting to feel comfortable with his likes and dislikes, to breathe free of the floodtide of wine opinion, off he went to California, France, and Italy to educate himself. That meant, in measure, coming to know himself, as well as something about what the winemaker was after. He had to dig into the notions of taste and the realities of terroir, into hugeness versus finesse, into the usable nuggets of prejudiced wisdom from the wine police threshed from the ego and dross. By temperament, Osborne is drawn to the stranger byways and backrooms of winemaking; he's not about to pass up a sampling from Angelo Gaja or lunch with Robert Mondavi (though both had him sweating his self-confidence), but he's happier in the company of California garagiste Bill Cadman, a man of "dark forces, mistakes, passions, and truculent convictions," or bad-boy alchemist Randall Grahm. Like Kermit Lynch and Simon Loftus, Osborne is looking for a connection between grape, place, and himself, a trifecta that, with growing exposure to ideas, intentions, and product, he hits more often than he would at the racetrack. His prose has a pleasing, gentle flow, with eddies of humor and yeastiness; Osborne displays a hungry mind, and a gift for taking in the landscape even if he dislikes the wine: "a distant field of mustardswitching off for the night," or "cypresses stabbing into the dark blue air . . . silhouettes of umbrella pines along the hills." He takes the showboats down a peg, but he isn't a self-conscious iconoclast, just an odd fellow looking for a mouthful of happiness. Personable and keen-minded.
