A review by rebecita
Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table: A Collection of Essays from the New York Times by Amanda Hesser

2.0

(With apologies to my dad, who generously gifted me this promising book!) Some of these essays stand nicely on their own but many are forgettable, and as a collection this is a waste of paper. A transparent attempt to milk some extra money out of a perfectly nice column in the NYT. It barely cracks 200 pages, and has literally an extra inch of right margin space. Every essay is followed by one of those frivolous tie-in recipes no one ever makes. One of these "essays" is just a reprinted excerpt from a Julia Child's My Life in France! And several others I'd already read in other collections. AND FINALLY these essays claim to avoid the sentimental, but if I have to suffer through another reference to Proust or his godforsaken cookies in foodwriting, I won't be held accountable for my actions.