Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


I’ll stick to my TV Bourdain

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

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Anthony Bourdain was one of my travel heroes and his suicide several years ago still guts me (while reminding me that people who look like they have everything you could want may still be very unhappy). I have never read any of his work before but I love his voice and attitude, which is to say: my expectations for this book were high. Kitchen Confidential was published in 2000 and was a bestseller. It is Bourdain’s memoir of working in the food industry, divided into […]

Get Read to Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way.

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As previously evidenced, I really love Anthony Bourdain. I think he’s an excellent TV personality, a good writer, and by all accounts a decent cook. I read his books out of order, but that didn’t seem to take away from anything. Kitchen Confidential was everything I wanted it to be. Straight-forward (as much as any memoir is, I suppose), lurid, profane, and yet somehow elegant. Bourdain has such a distinctive voice, be in in television or writing, and there’s no question of ghostwriters other autobiographies may raise. […]

Good food and good eating are about risk

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There’s a certain amusement that comes from knowing more than the teller of a story. I don’t often suggest reading memoirs or the like so far after their publication dates (see my experience with Denis Leary’s Why We Suck earlier this year). But, there was a delicious sort of fun to be had reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential  and knowing what his life would turn out like in the decade which followed the book’s publication in 2000. He certainly, had no idea. You’re likely familiar […]



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