- Hardcover: 128 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Press (HC) (April 21 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1594202168
- ISBN-13: 978-1594202162
- Product Dimensions: 18 x 13 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #176,712 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Book Description
Read by the author
Bestselling author Ruth Reichl examines her mother's life, giving voice to the universal unarticulated truth that we are grateful not to be our mothers.
About the Author
Ruth Reichl is the editor in chief of Gourmet magazine and the author of the bestsellers Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples. She has been the restaurant critic at the New York Times and the food editor at the Los Angeles Times.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.3 out of 5 stars (48 customer reviews)
83 of 91 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Very disappointing, April 24 2009
By JackieO - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Not Becoming My Mother (Hardcover)
Having loved Reichl's three other books and having loved the bits of her mother throughout them, I was really looking forward to this book. Right out of the box, it makes a bad first impression - it's small (really small) with large type and large margins. She starts off by recounting how stories involving her mother in her previous books were embarrassing, and consequently approaches this one cautiously. Maybe too cautiously? I liked the concept of Reichl using her mother's old letters as a framework on which to build the story, but nothing ever really happened with it. Worse than not having a solid story, this book lacks feeling, something you'd expect, and hope, to find so prevalent in a daughter's retelling of her mother's life. What you get here is a plain vanilla version of the story of an intersting, colorful woman that reads more like a Wikipedia biography than anything else.The woman in Reichl's other books was so real, so believable, so much like other women I've known from that generation all stitched together. That woman is barely recognizable here. We learn a bit about why she became the woman she did, but nothing about that woman. Reichl's mother seems more real through a quick memory in any of her previous books than she does in all 128 pages here.
Like another reviewer, it seemed obvious to me that this was published only to satisfy a contract. Otherwise, why would it have made it to the shelf? Of all the quips about her mother that Reichl has put into print, this is the most embarrassing. Save your money and wait to find this one in the bargain bin.
39 of 46 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, not great, April 21 2009
By Corsma - Published on Amazon.com
I have really enjoyed so many of Ruth Reichl's previous books and I JUST got my Kindle, so I was really excited to make this my first purchase. Sigh, I was so excited, I didn't realize it was a slim, slim volume. 128 pages or so. I finished it in about an hour. This should have been an article in the New Yorker, not a book. Glad I didn't pay to have the hardcover. It was a nice little story, but again, not a book, more an essay. Ah well, I will wait for the next one to come out.
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
A magazine article, not a book, April 26 2009
By BW - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Not Becoming My Mother (Hardcover)
I bought this on the Kindle, so I had no idea how short it was. If I had, I wouldn't have purchased it. I'm a big fan of Reichl's books, and am very puzzled why she's published this. As I read it, I kept wondering when the real book was going to start. It's a prelude, or a magazine article, not a book. Save your money and get it from the library; it's not worth the price.
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