Bibs, Napkins, Table Runners and Errant Surges of Genius.
The backdrop. Anthony Bourdain’s and Kamala Harris’s memoirs; Kitchen Confidential and 107 Days (personal thoughts, respectively, on both books here and here ) inspired this post. Again, what is so enrapturing about reading *truly engaging* memoirs, is its inherent unique quality. As I was reading Bourdain’s and Harris’s books, picking up tidbits of revelations here and there, got me to circling back on this memoir reading craze I’ve adopted. For the record, Bourdain’s and Harris’s books did share general similarities (typical in most engaging books); decent pacing. Honest, perhaps to a fault. And neither described a crunchy backdrop… as in difficult childhood. But I kept going back to that singular element that makes memoirs an incredibly valuable genre. Painting people…and things… with broad brushes and stuffing them in boxes is easy to do on the fly, but NOT so simple when hearing directly from the source…as in reading a memoir. My earliest introduction to this per...
