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Don't Be a Donkey Audiolibro Por Chadd McArthur arte de portada

Written by a ten year old

Total
1 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
1 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 04-23-19

It isn’t the stop and start, too earnest performance (by the author) that dooms this book. It’s the author’s complete lack of writing talent combined with his utter dearth of anything remotely interesting to say. It reads like a fourth-grade book report, and not a report by one of the smarter kids in the class. I’ll be brief:

1. The writing is atrocious. Really, really bad. The frequent cliches become unintentionally silly, so I don’t mean those. It’s the rest—the total inability to string interesting words together. This isn’t the book’s most serious sin; that’s it’s missing content. But interesting writing will help paper over platitudes and generalizations. Not here. There is not a single well-written sentence in the entire book.

2. There is no content. I’m not saying that the content is dumb. I mean, there is dumb content, but there isn’t even much of that. It’s just content free. Even the personal stories, like the chef’s visit to Spain, falls into generalizations about Spanish culture that may have been borrowed from a 1983 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. For whatever reason, the author displays a total inability to say anything interesting.

3. The performance is ridiculous. The author seems continually surprised by his own words. “A server and I went to cater a function in a very wealthy neighborhood in Toronto. For an event for potentially one of my most wealthy clients.” These aren’t two sentences, but they’re spoken as two, because the author doesn’t realize the second part is coming until he sees it.

There’s no question that the author thinks he has a lot to say. He thinks he has lessons to teach. He may not even know that he forgot to put any of that in the book.

I’m angry that I spent any money and time on this book. Please don’t. If you’re thinking of ignoring this review, try this: Find a way—google books, Amazon preview, local bookstore, whatever—to open the book to any page and read two paragraphs. You’ll see how bad the entire book is and avoid wasting your time any further.

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At the Chef's Table Audiolibro Por Vanina Leschziner arte de portada

This book exposes the ridiculousness of some sociology, but not much about the culinary world

Total
1 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
1 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 10-10-18

First, this reads like an extra-long paper for a low-level graduate sociology class. The jargon is barely useful. Sometimes it seems like parody. Read (or listen to) the appendix, which describes the “methodology,” before you read anything else. This will prepare you for the socio-babble you’re about to endure.

Second, the conclusions in this book are either obvious or unsupported, and the ethical conclusions are just a bit silly. For instance, the silly: A chef is “ethical” if he—you’re thinking it’s if he treats employees well, doesn’t steal, etc., but no—does not imbue his food with too much flash, just to get attention.

Then there’s the obvious—that is, obvious to all but the Christopher-Columbia-like explorer, who finds a world “new” because he’s never seen it before: Chefs who study under other highly skilled or highly regarded chefs are more likely to become highly skilled or successful themselves.

And the unsupported: Chefs who start their own restaurants are likely to choose a region/cuisine that is different from that of their mentors because they need to distinguish themselves and avoid being thought of as having stolen recipes.

There are a few gems. For instance, highly regarded chefs claim that culinary schools (like the CIA) are not good preparation, and therefore that they prefer not to hire those graduates, but that they predominately hire them anyway.

If you long to hear words like “normative” (used in two different ways) and “phenomenological” and “duality” and “dichotomy” all used within two sentences, this is your kind of screed. If you want to learn about the culinary world, read a book by or about a chef, like Marcus Samuelson’s “Yes, Chef,” or Marco Pierre White’s “The Devil in the Kitchen,” or even Bill Buford’s “Heat” or Daniel Boulud’s “Letters to a Young Chef.”

By the way, the performance was adequate for the material, and I doubt any performer could have made this dry drivel any more interesting, though I didn’t get the sense that this performer tried.

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Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Audiolibro Por Andrew Friedman arte de portada

Interesting history, ok reading performance

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 09-15-18

The story is interesting, if you care about the subject. There’s a bit of repetition of quotations, close in time, which strikes the listener as odd, because they’re all specifically worded. (Maybe they were too good to use just once?) But otherwise the book takes a nice twisting path through contemporary American restaurant history.

The performance is just fine. All of the women’s “voices” are essentially identical and a little whiny. Accents drop out here and there, and some are unidentifiable. Names are sometimes mispronounced. All fine. But the cooking terms and food names are often wrong (e.g., abalone becomes a-beh-lon). This is a book partially about food, and you get the feeling the performer didn’t bother even to look up the words he didn’t know. Some of common English words are also mispronounced—very strange for professional voice work, and somewhat jarring for the listener.

In sum, the story is good and the performance passable. I’m not sorry I bought it and spent time on it.

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