When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone's boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no? This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became...

Chronicles the mother-daughter relationship of culinary author Ruth Reichl, now editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, and her late mother, Miriam. Miriam Brudno, who bowed to societal and familial pressure to become a wife and a mother over pursuing a fulfilling career, cheered her daughter on and pointed out that Ruth had an obligation, both to herself and to her mother, to use her life well.

In the technicolor glow of the early seventies, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of the Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day—luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her paean to that fascinating social circle and the depth of their shared commitment to activism,

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"Lisa Donovan is anyone's definition of a strong woman. She has built several lauded restaurants from the ground up, including Sean Brock's Husk empire; she raised two brilliant children with no money; she is a rape survivor; she is a profoundly talented artist. But from her early childhood, she had been told at every juncture that she wasn't enough: she came from a poor Southern family that despised its own Zuni/Mexican roots and repeatedly silenced...

"From the writers of acclaimed blog Pen & Palate, a humorous coming-of-age (and mastering-the-art-of-home-cooking) memoir of friendship, told through stories, recipes, and beautiful illustrations. Getting through life in your twenties isn't easy--especially if you're broke, awkward, and prone to starting small grease fires in your studio apartment. For best friends Lucy Madison and Tram Nguyen, cooking was an escape from the daily humiliation that...

"From the author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone ("The Queen of Greens" --The Washington Post)--a warm, bracingly honest memoir that also gives us an insider's look at the vegetarian movement. Thanks to her beloved cookbooks and groundbreaking work as the chef at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, Deborah Madison, though not a vegetarian herself, has long been revered as this country's leading authority on vegetables. She profoundly changed the...

Camas Davis was at an unhappy crossroads. A longtime magazine writer and editor in the food world, she'd returned to her home state of Oregon with her boyfriend from New York City to take an appealing job at a Portland lifestyle magazine. But neither job nor boyfriend delivered on her dreams, and in the span of a year, Davis was unemployed, on her own, with nothing to fall back on. Disillusioned by the years shed spent mediating the lives of others...

Bruni, restaurant critic for The New York Times, tells his heartbreaking and hilarious account of his lifelong, often painful struggle with food.