Salon.com > Books http://www.salon.com Fri, 03 May 2013 02:55:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Here’s how to change the world http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/heres_how_to_change_the_world/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/heres_how_to_change_the_world/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13287718 “How to Change the World” takes as its modest premise the idea that everyone is capable of creating massive, global change -- if only we start small and set manageable goals. It’s just like quitting smoking!

The book’s author, British journalist and life coach John-Paul Flintoff, has some experience in this area: for his last book, “Sew Your Own,” he learned to make all his own clothes. This allowed him to opt out of the unethical labor practices of the big clothing companies, and also gave him something to do with an old sewing machine. He reports that shirts are his favorite things to make.

“How to Change the World” is different from “Sew Your Own” in that it doesn’t offer a roadmap for a particular kind of change -- instead, Flintoff invites us to imagine what kinds of change we’d like to make, and suggests some ways to go about it.

For example, Flintoff tells a story about how he got very worried about global warming and decided the only solution was for everyone to grow their own produce. It wasn’t enough to just change his own habits -- everyone would need to pitch in to make a dent in carbon consumption. He wanted to start with the people living in his section of London, but rather than harangue his neighbors, Flintoff devised a plan.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/heres_how_to_change_the_world/feed/ 0 Claire Messud to Publishers Weekly: “What kind of question is that?” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/claire_messud_to_publishers_weekly_what_kind_of_question_is_that/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/claire_messud_to_publishers_weekly_what_kind_of_question_is_that/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 14:47:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13286637 In Salon this week, Laura Miller raved that Claire Messud's new novel, "The Woman Upstairs," is "claustrophobically hypnotic" and "a ferocious portrait of creative and spiritual frustration."

The author's feeling some of that frustration as well, with reductive media questions about the likability of her main character -- a question that might not be posed to a male author in quite this way -- as this new interview with Publishers Weekly shows: 

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/claire_messud_to_publishers_weekly_what_kind_of_question_is_that/feed/ 14 Secret to happiness: “I want this job for a week” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/secret_to_happiness_i_want_this_job_for_a_week/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/secret_to_happiness_i_want_this_job_for_a_week/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 14:07:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13285944 Looking for meaningful, fulfilling work? Good luck. With unemployment at 7.7 percent, anything that keeps us off the bread lines should be counted as a victory.

So it seems like an inopportune time to think about changing jobs, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or being very picky if you don’t. But Roman Krznaric, a British author, empathy theorist and “lifestyle philosopher,” thinks he has the solution.

Krznaric’s book “How to Find Fulfilling Work” is an entry in the School of Life, Alain de Botton’s series of self-help books for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in the self-help section. In it, Krznaric argues that the way we’ve been trained to find our life’s work is completely wrong. He takes issue in particular with the personality tests administered by career counselors to judge one’s strengths and interests. They’re complete bunk, Krznaric argues, pointing out that you’ve got a 50 percent chance of being placed in a different personality category if you retake the test.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/secret_to_happiness_i_want_this_job_for_a_week/feed/ 4 Was Mother Teresa a masochist? http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_to_be_real_has_to_hurt_the_masochism_of_mother_teresa_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_to_be_real_has_to_hurt_the_masochism_of_mother_teresa_partner/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:04:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13285657 AlterNet

In the last century, no one icon has improved the Catholic brand as much as the small woman who founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose image aligns beautifully with that of the new pope. In March a team of Canadian researchers noted the opportunity: “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of [Mother Teresa] to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful, especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_to_be_real_has_to_hurt_the_masochism_of_mother_teresa_partner/feed/ 29 Steven Soderbergh is writing a novella on Twitter http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/steven_soderbergh_is_writing_a_novella_on_twitter/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/steven_soderbergh_is_writing_a_novella_on_twitter/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13284953 It's an exciting day on Twitter. Donald Trump is fighting with Danny Zuker, Mel Brooks just joined for Twitter's ComedyFest and "Magic Mike" director Steven Soderbergh is tweeting a novella:

[embedtweet id="328648080301903872"]

The first chapter begins in "Amsterdam."

[embedtweet id="328648452579930115"]

It's a crime mystery told in the second-person:

There are pictures:

[embedtweet id="328649328967155714"]

Read chapters one through seven here.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/steven_soderbergh_is_writing_a_novella_on_twitter/feed/ 5 Beastie Boys to write memoir http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/beastie_boys_to_write_memoir/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/beastie_boys_to_write_memoir/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:50:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13284668 The surviving members of the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), are writing a high-concept memoir, reports the New York Times.

The band has been toying with the idea for years -- even before third member Adam Yauch (MCA) died at 47 from cancer in 2012. “After Yauch died, I didn’t push them,” said agent Luke Janklow. “But I think that Adam and Mike ended up realizing that it was the right time for them.”

From the Times:

The Beastie Boys are “interested in challenging the form and making the book a multidimensional experience,” [publisher Julie] Grau said in an interview. “There is a kaleidoscopic frame of reference, and it asks a reader to keep up.”

The book, to be edited by the hip-hop journalist Sacha Jenkins, will be loosely structured as an oral history. It will also have contributions by other writers, as well as a strong visual component. Ms. Grau and Luke Janklow, the group’s agent, both compared it to Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys’ acclaimed but short-lived magazine in the 1990s, which explored some of its wide-ranging pop-culture interests with curiosity and snark.

Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau, which published Jay-Z's "Decoded," has taken on the project and is targeting a fall 2015 release.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/beastie_boys_to_write_memoir/feed/ 0 How “Life of Pi” anticipated 9/11 http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/a_boy_a_boat_and_a_tiger_life_of_pi_as_contemporary_fable_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/a_boy_a_boat_and_a_tiger_life_of_pi_as_contemporary_fable_partner/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283310 Los
Angeles Review of Books
PERHAPS THE BIGGEST SURPRISE at the 2013 Oscar ceremony was that Ang Lee beat out Steven Spielberg for Best Director with his adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. Martel’s novel was itself a surprising Man Booker Prize award winner in 2002. You may remember that a controversy followed: according to some, Martel’s book, about a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger, was suspiciously similar to that of Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar’s 1981 novella Max and the Cats, about a man in a lifeboat with a jaguar. In a short essay titled “How I Wrote Life of Pi,” Martel has accounted for the influence that Scliar’s novel — or rather, what he recalls as John Updike’s negative review of the novel in The New York Times Book Review — had on him. (In fact, Updike never seems to have reviewed the book at all, and the only review that ran in The Times was positive.) Martel — who claims he only read Max and the Cats after the accusations of plagiarism surfaced in 2002 — borrowed Scliar’s basic premise, trying to turn it into a novel that was more successful than the one Updike had allegedly reviewed:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/a_boy_a_boat_and_a_tiger_life_of_pi_as_contemporary_fable_partner/feed/ 6 When Derrida discovered Marx http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/grappling_with_specters_of_marx_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/grappling_with_specters_of_marx_partner/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283127 Los
Angeles Review of Books ON THE OCCASION of the 20th anniversary of the “Whither Marxism?” conference conceived by Stephen Cullenberg and Bernd Magnus and organized by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside, we asked Peggy Kamuf to reflect on the lecture that Jacques Derrida delivered there: “Specters of Marx.” The lecture was eventually published as a book, translated into English by Kamuf, and subtitled The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. It stands as a landmark text in Derrida’s oeuvre.

¤

“I meant to read Marx my way when the time came.” So Jacques Derrida declared in an interview with Michael Sprinker in 1989. Four years later, the conference “Whither Marxism?” was going to give him the occasion to do just that: read Marx his way. That was also the year, of course, the Berlin Wall fell, and then the dominoes continued to fall all over the former Communist bloc. So — in the ruins of Marxism, on the grave (good riddance!) of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism, or whatever name is finally settled upon for the monstrous construction that had just fallen apart — the time had finally come to read Marx.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/grappling_with_specters_of_marx_partner/feed/ 34 Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig? http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_michael_pollan_a_sexist_pig/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_michael_pollan_a_sexist_pig/#comments Sun, 28 Apr 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13282314 My grandmother, a 1960s housewife of the cigarette-in-one-hand-cocktail-in-the-other variety, thought a slab of frozen Sara Lee pound cake was a totally appropriate breakfast for her children. My mother, a busy working baby boomer, was a serviceable cook who mostly just wanted to get something healthy into her three kids’ bellies before bath time. This meant lots of cheese quesadillas, rotisserie chickens from the Kroger, and “face plates”—slices of banana, mini chicken sausages, olives, and the like, arranged like smiley faces. We loved those. Now divorced and in her fifties, she says she’s “done” cooking and happily subsists on granola bars and apples and hard-boiled eggs.

As for me, I’ve been learning to can jam, bake bread from scratch in my Dutch oven (though my husband is better at it), and make my own tomato sauce from a bushel of ugly tomatoes I bought at the farmer’s market.

My grandmother, were she not dead (the cigarettes), would no doubt look at me like I’m crazy.

“Don’t you know that you can buy that stuff ?” she’d ask.

But it’s not about buying stuff these days, it’s about making it (if you’re middle-class, liberal, and white, that is). Homemade, from scratch, DIY, straight from the backyard, fresh baked, artisan.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/28/is_michael_pollan_a_sexist_pig/feed/ 106 We tried to weaponize the weather http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/we_tried_to_weaponize_the_weather/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/we_tried_to_weaponize_the_weather/#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280800 The years between the first hydrogen bomb tests and the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 saw more than just increased anxiety about the effects of nuclear testing on weather. They also saw increased interest in large-scale, purposeful environmental modification. Most climate modification enthusiasts spoke of increasing global temperatures, in the hopes that this would increase the quantity of cultivated land and make for fairer weather. Some suggested blackening deserts or snowy areas, to increase absorption of radiation. Covering large areas with carbon dust, so the theory went, would raise temperatures. Alternatively, if several hydrogen bombs were exploded underwater, they might evaporate seawater and create an ice cloud that would block the escape of radiation. Meteorologist Harry Wexler had little patience for those who wanted to add weather and climate modification to the set of tools in man’s possession. But by 1958 even he acknowledged that serious proposals for massive changes, using nuclear weapons as tools, were inevitable. Like most professional meteorologists, in the past he had dismissed the idea that hydrogen bombs had affected the weather. But with the prospect of determined experiments designed to bring about such changes, he warned of “the unhappy situation of the cure being worse than the ailment.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/we_tried_to_weaponize_the_weather/feed/ 41 Austerity opposition goes mainstream http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/a_lesson_to_the_left_it_will_no_longer_do_to_simply_be_anti_austerity_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/a_lesson_to_the_left_it_will_no_longer_do_to_simply_be_anti_austerity_partner/#comments Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283171 JacobinAusterity is collecting a lot of high-flying enemies these days. In the past month the manager of PIMCO, the largest bond-buying firm in the world, top figures at Blackrock, one of the most influential investment banks in the world, the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, and Martin Wolf, world-renowned finance commentator for the Financial Times, have all come out vigorously against austerity.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/27/a_lesson_to_the_left_it_will_no_longer_do_to_simply_be_anti_austerity_partner/feed/ 12 New documents reveal A.A. Milne was a secret wartime propagandist http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/new_documents_reveal_a_a_milne_was_a_secret_wartime_propagandist/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/new_documents_reveal_a_a_milne_was_a_secret_wartime_propagandist/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:52:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13283178 New documents reveal that venerated "Winnie-the-Pooh" author A.A. Milne, a steadfast pacifist, secretly served as a wartime propagandist for a top-secret intelligence unit called MI7b during WWI.

According to the Telegraph, MI7b was founded in 1916 and designed "to sustain support for the war":

The secret propaganda unit was established in 1916 to sustain support for the war when the enormous numbers of soldiers killed were rising and increasing anti-war movements were sweeping war-torn Europe.

It was made up of 20 other authors taken from the best of British talent at the time, who had to write thousands of positive newspaper articles about Victoria Cross winners, heroism and sanitised accounts of life in the trenches - as well as reports of atrocities by German troops.

Although most of the articles were destroyed, one of the members of the unit, Capt James Lloyd, saved a collection that his great nephew, Jeremy Arter, only recently discovered. He told the Telegraph that "I was astonished when my research showed that they were meant to have been destroyed soon after the war because they were deemed 'too incriminating.'"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/new_documents_reveal_a_a_milne_was_a_secret_wartime_propagandist/feed/ 6 Owen King’s sparkling debut http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/double_feature_doubles_up_on_pathos_laughs_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/double_feature_doubles_up_on_pathos_laughs_partner/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13281973 I DON'T KNOW WHAT I was expecting from Owen King’s debut novel, Double Feature, but I wasn’t expecting to laugh so hard that my eyebrows hurt. But I did. I laughed that hard. I’m not sure why the impact on my eyebrows was so immediate and intense. Maybe because they’d jump up at certain scenes in the novel and then ride the rising waves shooting from the lower half of my face. Los Angeles Review of Books

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/double_feature_doubles_up_on_pathos_laughs_partner/feed/ 3 David Sedaris has a pleasingly strange voice http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/david_sedaris_has_a_pleasingly_strange_voice/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/david_sedaris_has_a_pleasingly_strange_voice/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13281880 David Sedaris first rose to prominence on public radio, with his 1992 performance of “Santaland Diaries,” in which he told the story of his career as Crumpet the Elf at the New York Macy’s. The most astonishing thing about this and other early performances, in retrospect, is how all the elements that conspired to make Sedaris a writer-celebrity — the embellishment from his own life, the transparent hyperbole, the play with repetition, the sharp and occasionally dark edge of his observational humor, and most of all his own pleasingly strange voice — were already present and operating so strongly that they seemed to belong to their own special genre (the Sedaris, let’s say) long before Sedaris had written and performed enough pieces that the group of them could reasonably qualify as a genre.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/david_sedaris_has_a_pleasingly_strange_voice/feed/ 0 With crowdsourcing, everyone’s a detective now http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/crowdsourcing_will_not_go_away_everyones_a_detective_now/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/crowdsourcing_will_not_go_away_everyones_a_detective_now/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280644 Observers looked on in concern in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings last week, as Reddit and 4Chan fingered assorted innocent civilians as suspects. Many were reminded of 17th-century witch hunts and Richard Jewell. Me, I thought of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

As is known by anyone who has either read Stieg Larsson's 2005 novel or seen one of the two film adaptations (and that seems to be just about everyone), the big break in the case comes when Mikael Blomkvist sees a photograph taken of spectators at a parade 36 years earlier. One of those spectators, a 16-year-old girl named Harriet Vanger, disappeared that day, and Blomkvist has been hired by her great uncle to find out what happened to her. Blomkvist notices that Harriet, unlike all the other people in the crowd on the sidewalk -- who are watching the parade and smiling -- is instead looking in another direction with an expression of great distress. After burying himself in the photo archives of the local newspaper for days, Blomkvist unearths a shot from a different angle, showing a woman taking yet another photo, over Harriet's shoulder. By tracking down that woman and her snapshot, he's able to see exactly who Harriet feared.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/crowdsourcing_will_not_go_away_everyones_a_detective_now/feed/ 11 Loneliness! Labial reconstruction! Some hostages! http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/loneliness_labial_reconstruction_some_hostages/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/loneliness_labial_reconstruction_some_hostages/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:02:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280090 Among the many sterling novels coming out this April, authors Allison Amend (“A Nearly Perfect Copy”), Amy Brill (“The Movement of Stars”), Jennifer Gilmore (“The Mothers”) and Fiona Maazel (“Woke Up Lonely”) have stood out.

I interviewed all four, limiting them primarily to incomplete sentences and indirect responses -- and asked them to pose questions to each other at the end.

Without summarizing the plot in any way, what would you say your novel is about?

FIONA MAAZEL: Loneliness! A city underneath the city of Cincinnati. North Korea. Labial reconstruction. Paths towards and away from estrangement. A cult. Some hostages. Cloud seeding.

ALLISON AMEND: "A Nearly Perfect Copy" challenges our presumptions about originality and authenticity, loss and replacement, and the perilous pursuit of perfection. OK, I copied that from the book jacket. But I wrote it the first time …

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/loneliness_labial_reconstruction_some_hostages/feed/ 0 “Where Islam meets America”: The making of Zaytuna College http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/where_islam_meets_america_the_making_of_zaytuna_college_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/where_islam_meets_america_the_making_of_zaytuna_college_partner/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:38:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13279883 Light without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College

by Scott Korb

Beacon Press, 2013
Religion Dispatches
What inspired you to write Light Without Fire? 

In the wake of the Fort Hood mass shooting by Army Medical Corps officer Nadil Malik Hasan, Forbes published an essay under the headline “Going Muslim,” written by Tunku Varadarajan, who today often writes for The Daily Beast. At the time, Varadarajan was working at NYU, where I teach writing courses, often about religion. The coinage he explained this way:

“This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/where_islam_meets_america_the_making_of_zaytuna_college_partner/feed/ 2 Secrets of the conservative media machine http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/secrets_of_the_conservative_media_machine/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/secrets_of_the_conservative_media_machine/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:21:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13273210 To borrow a Sarah Palin aphorism, after their election defeat in 2008, conservatives didn’t retreat, they “reloaded.” Instead of finding new solutions to public policy problems or seriously reevaluating Bush’s failures, conservatives focused almost solely on new ways to communicate their old ideas. To do so, they looked to their natural allies in corporate marketing for inspiration -- and they looked to the Left for imitation. The result has been a recent and profound turnaround that has allowed the Right the bury Obama’s message and dominate the political debate.

Historical right-wing domination of the media

Traditionally, conservatives have almost always dominated direct mail solicitations, retained the best pollsters money could buy and paid for the most celebrated advertising makers. Message discipline is the first lesson for any Republican politician. Talk radio? unquestionably controlled by conservatives.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/secrets_of_the_conservative_media_machine/feed/ 28 Augusten Burroughs: “What did normal people do when they stopped drinking?” http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/augusten_burroughs_what_did_normal_people_do_when_they_stopped_drinking/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/augusten_burroughs_what_did_normal_people_do_when_they_stopped_drinking/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13274513 When I was a kid, one of my many phobias was that somebody would read my diary. Not because I revealed anything particularly secret beyond run-of-the-mill complaints about my brother’s greasy metallic aroma or the lack of buying power afforded by my pittance of an allowance. It’s just that I’d written this journal only for me; it wasn’t polite enough or interesting enough or funny enough for anyone else to read.

Dry began as nothing more ambitious than a journal I started the day I returned to New York City from rehab in Minnesota.

I was feeling nearly electrified with the discomfort of existing with a blood alcohol level at zero. And I had no idea what to do with my sober self.

What did normal people do when they weren’t drinking?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/augusten_burroughs_what_did_normal_people_do_when_they_stopped_drinking/feed/ 16 “Cooked”: Michael Pollan takes kitchen duty http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/cooked_michael_pollan_takes_kitchen_duty/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/21/cooked_michael_pollan_takes_kitchen_duty/#comments Sun, 21 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13277908 Much food writing is little more than a gaseous substance that collects around recipes and advice. I like to cook and make most of my own meals, but I have no patience for the touchstones of foodie literature, like M.F.K. Fisher, with her preening sensuality, or the imperious fussiness of Richard Olney. Nigella Lawson's phone-sex cooing makes me grind my teeth. Just cut the mystification and razzamatazz, and tell me how to make a decent lentil soup, already! While we're at it, I also hate celebrity chefs and rhapsodic restaurant reviews. Especially during a week like the one we've just had, most food writing manifests a serious disorder of perspective, and its perpetrators come across as more navel-gazing and trivia-obsessed than the most self-involved memoirist.

Apart from flashing my curmudgeon credentials, I'm trying to say that in this department, my bar is set pretty high. There are three food writers I will listen to. Two are true cooks (not chefs): the peerless Mark Bittman, who understands what does and does not matter about how we cook and eat, and Martha Stewart, who -- say what you will! -- taught me everything I know about baking. (Julia Child seems delightfully down-to-earth, but I'm not very interested in French cooking.)

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