What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorYes, Chef
Marcus Samuelsson · 327 pages
"It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Mar
Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir
Domingo Martinez · 449 pages
"Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving. Partly a reflection on the culture of machismo and partly an exploration of the author's boyhood spent in his sister's hand-me-down clothes, this book delves into the enduring and complex bond between Martinez and his deeply flawed, but fi
My Life in France
Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme · 344 pages
Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the coun
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages
A celebrity chef shares anecdotes of his experience in the restaurant industry, and of his journey from dishwasher to a position of fame in the food industry.
Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
Ruth Reichl · 320 pages
Warm, very descriptive of mouth watering food interspersed with receipes. A story of food and her life which was quite an exciting one of a restaurant critic.
Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage
Molly Wizenberg · 241 pages
"When Molly Wizenberg married Brandon Pettit, she vowed always to support him, to work with him to make their hopes and dreams real. She evinced enthusiasm about Brandon's enthusiasms: building a violin, building a boat, and opening an ice cream store--none of which came to pass. So when Brandon started making plans to open a pizza restaurant, Molly felt sure that the restaurant would join the lis
Almost French: A New Life In Paris
Sarah Turnbull · 320 pages
A delightful, fresh twist on the travel memoir, Almost French takes us on a tour that is fraught with culture clashes but rife with deadpan humor. Sarah Turnbull's stint in Paris was only supposed to last a week. Chance had brought Sarah and Frederic together in Bucharest, and on impulse she decides to take him up on his offer to visit him in the world's most romantic city. Sacrificing Vegemite f
Maman's Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen
Donia Bijan · 254 pages
""Donia Bijan discovers a way back to home and what it means to belong. A memoir both universal and intimate, anchored in history and lifted by the mysterious elements that only occur in a warm and inviting kitchen." --Marsha Mehran, author Pomegranate Soup For Donia Bijan's family, food has been the language they use to tell their stories and to communicate their love. In 1978, when the Islamic R
Stealing Buddha's Dinner
Bich Minh Nguyen · 272 pages
As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mai
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 248 pages
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civiliza
Mixed: My Life in Black and White
Angela Nissel · 234 pages
Midsummer's Mayhem
Rajani LaRocca · 351 pages
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living
Julie Powell · 309 pages
Julie Powell is 30 years old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a secretarial job that's going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy, but as she moves from
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Marjane Satrapi · 160 pages
Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and
The Heart of a Woman
Maya Angelou · 280 pages
Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired countless readers with the first three volumes of her autobiography, one of the most remarkable personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman, her turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for
Life from Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness
Sasha Martin · 352 pages
"It was a culinary journey like no other: Over the course of 195 weeks, food writer and blogger Sasha Martin set out to cook--and eat--a meal from every country in the world. As cooking unlocked the memories of her rough-and-tumble childhood and the loss and heartbreak that came with it, Martin became more determined than ever to find peace and elevate her life through the prism of food and world
How to Make White People Laugh
Negin Farsad · 244 pages
"Negin Farsad is an Iranian-American-Muslim female stand-up comedian who believes she can change the world, one joke at a time. In HOW TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE LAUGH, Farsad shares her personal experiences growing up as the "Other" in an American culture that has no time for nuance. Writing bluntly and hilariously about the elements of race we are often too politically correct to discuss, Farsad takes
Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America
Linda Furiya · 256 pages
While growing up in Versailles, an Indiana farm community, Linda Furiya tried to balance the outside world of Midwestern America with the Japanese traditions of her home life. As the only Asian family in a tiny township, Furiya's life revolved around Japanese food and the extraordinary lengths her parents went to in order to gather the ingredients needed to prepare it. As immigrants, her parents a
Recipe for Life
Mary Berry · 414 pages
From the moment she came into the world - two weeks early, throwing her parents' lives into disarray - Mary has gracefully but firmly done things her way. A love affair with cookery in her teens became a full-time career as one of our most prolific and best-loved cookery writers, and at nearly eighty a TV sensation on the Great British Bake Off. But as a working mother, at the heart of a busy hous
Encore Provence: New Adventures in the South of France
Peter Mayle · 226 pages
More of the pleasures of a year in Provence, this text presents portraits of the pleasures of life in the Luberon.
Becoming
Michelle Obama · 432 pages
In this adaptation of her autobiography for younger readers, Michelle Obama presents an account of her life, and, in telling of her own personal evolution, stresses the need for people to realize that no one is perfect, that the process of "becoming" is what really matters.
32 Yolks
Eric Ripert · 251 pages
"Before he earned his third Michelin star at his iconic restaurant, Le Bernardin, the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef of the Year, became a regular guest judge on Bravo's Top Chef, even before he knew how to make a proper omelet, Eric Ripert was a young boy in the South of France who felt that his world had come to an end. At the age of five, his parents went through a bitter divorce. Eric
Give a Girl a Knife
Amy Thielen · 315 pages
"A beautifully written memoir that follows one woman from her childhood in a dysfunctional Midwestern family to becoming a chef in New York City and finally her triumphant return home to reclaim and redeem Midwestern cooking. Amy Thielen, author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook The New Midwestern Table, traces her journey from Park Rapids, Minnesota, to cooking professionally under some o