The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen

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An Inspiration to Cooks and a Great Companion Piece to the United States of Arugula

puts current food 'celebs' to shame.

Add Chives!

Gastronimic Senses - A Classic Story

Charming and Funny

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
Jacques Pepin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0618444114

Amazon.com

The sparkling personality, sense of humor, and charm familiar to Jacques Pépin's television audiences carries over to the page in the superstar chef's humbly titled memoir, The Apprentice.

A clever, mischievous, and very likable boy, Pépin's earliest food memories are hungry ones from his childhood in war-torn France. After World War II, his first restaurant job was peeling potatoes for his mother at her restaurant, and he became an apprentice in a hotel kitchen at age 13. In this delightful tale he works hard, plays fair, is kind to others and good to his family, and his efforts take him to Paris, and then New York. Except for the terrible car accident that required him to reinvent himself as a teacher and television personality, he seems to have always been in the right place at the right time. He cooked for Prime Minister Gaillard and then General Charles de Gaulle, met Pierre Franey, Craig Claiborne, and Julia Child, and turned down a job cooking for JFK to accept one with Howard Johnson. But just as entertaining and enjoyable to read about are his tender memories and thoughts about his relationships with his parents and brothers, and with his wife and daughter.

We all wish we could cook like Pepin (and every chapter ends with one of Pépin's favorite recipes), but this enchanting tale will make you wish you knew him. The clear, simple way he expresses himself and the honesty with which he tells his story will bring you to tears, and make you laugh out loud. --Leora Y. Bloom

Book Description

From the moment of its publication, The Apprentice established itself as an "instant classic" (Anthony Bourdain). With sparkling wit and occasional pathos, the man whom Julia Child has called "the best chef in America" tells the captivating story of his rise from a terrified thirteen-year-old toiling in an Old World French kitchen to an American superstar who ad-libbed and demonstrated culinary wizardry as the cameras rolled and changed American tastes. The Apprentice is an engrossing tale of the modern cooking scene and how it came to be, told from an engaging personal perspective. The story begins in prewar France, with young Jacques cutting his teeth in his mother's small restaurants. Moving to Paris, it offers tantalizing glimpses of Sartre and Genet. In his role as Charles de Gaulle's personal chef, Jacques witnesses history being made from behind the swinging door of the kitchen. In America, he rejects an offer to be chef in the Kennedy White House, choosing instead to work at Howard Johnson's. He then proceeds to make some history of his own, creating a revolution with a band of fellow food lovers: Julia Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne. Culinary high jinks and revealing portraits ensue. The Apprentice also includes well-loved recipes, from Maman's Cheese Souffl to Chicken Salad la Danny Kaye.

Customer Reviews:

An Inspiration to Cooks and a Great Companion Piece to the United States of Arugula.......2007-07-29

What a lovely book -- elegant, flavorful, delightful! My compliments to the chef. Jacques Pepin accomplishes much with a few key ingredients. I aspire to do the same with my review. As I read the book, I couldn't help thinking that I was reading first-hand source material for the book, The United States of Arugula, a fascinating, if breezy, history of food tastes in the U.S.

puts current food 'celebs' to shame........2007-07-11

A fascinating book. His experiences in real French kitchens, post WW2, when the apprentice system was still in place are truly amazing. This man worked harder than a dog (as do all real chefs!) to learn about food. I especially enjoyed the early part of the book where he reminisces about his family's life in German occupied France. He doesn't talk about solders mind you, he talks about it from the point of view of what they ate!

They really don't make them like this anymore. If you enjoy cooking at all you will enjoy this book. I mean, the man read Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in manuscript form! He was there at the awakening of the US to its modern culinary tradition, and he has some stories to tell. He also includes quite a few quirky recipes such as for his mother's deviled eggs. Jacques Pepin's story puts 99% of the current crop of cooking `celebs' to shame in terms of training and real food experience. Rachel Ray worked, where, in a fine food store in Lake George NY for a couple of years? Be serious. JP spent more time learning how to prep vegetables. I loved every word. If you enjoy a well prepared meal and are at all interested in how it got to your plate you will love this book too.

Add Chives!.......2007-07-09

I became a fan of Pepin after seeing his show on PBS...I believe it aired Thursdays or Fridays before I had to go into my restaurant job as a bartender. I have worked in restaurants for most of my life, and I was delighted to hear about his life and encounters with food and people!

His voice is SPLENDID! The recounting of first tastes and lifelong allies including: his mother, father, brothers, wife Gloria, best friend Jean-Claude, contemporaries Julia Child, Helen McCully, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, The Kennedys, the HoJo Family, and Danny Kaye is a marvel and testament to his cooking and attitude.

For anyone who is a fan of food and life, this is your book!

Gastronimic Senses - A Classic Story.......2007-06-19

The audio version of this book, beautifully written by Jacques Pepin and read by Michel Chevalier, (with an animated, French accent perfect for this writing), is great fun. It's a perfect listen for the car or while walking/hiking/commuting.

Pepin tells his life story thru gastronomic senses in which he paints stories of his life against his culinary education . Pepin was obviously born to cook and to write. His chaper/stories capture a great sense of time and place, with insights, humor, self-deprecation and a real joy of life.

To borrow a description from Pepin's fellow chef and author Anthony Bourdain from his own reader comments, this book is an 'instant classic'.

Charming and Funny.......2007-05-08

This autobiography of a chef who moves from France to America is fun and fill of French charm.

Average customer rating:

The Apprentice : My Life in the Kitchen

Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000HN0O5Q

Average customer rating:

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
Jacques Pepin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000O3OF5Y

Average customer rating:

First 50 years of the SAT

entertaining, but lacks focus

You are wrong

The Big Test - An interesting Book

De Tocqueville Would Find This Well Worth Reading

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
Nicholas Lemann
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374527512

Amazon.com

Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test starts off as a look at how the SAT became an integral part of the college application process by telling the stories of men like Henry Chauncey and James Bryant Conant of Harvard University, who sought in the 1930s and '40s to expand their student base beyond the offspring of Brahmin alumni. When they went into the public schools of the Midwest to recruit, standardized testing gave them the means to select which lucky students would be deemed most suitable for an Ivy League education. But about a third of the way through the book, Lemann shifts gears and writes about several college students from the late '60s and early '70s. The reasons for the change-up only become clear in the final third, when those same college students, now in their 40s, lead the fight against California's Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot initiative aimed at eliminating affirmative action programs.

Do these two stories really belong together? For all his storytelling abilities--and they are prodigious--Lemann is not entirely persuasive on this point, especially when he identifies the crucial moment in the civil rights era when "affirmative action evolved as a low-cost patch solution to the enormous problem of improving the lot of American Negroes, who had an ongoing, long-standing tradition of deeply inferior education; at the same time American society was changing so as to make educational performance the basis for individual advancement." Lemann's muddled transition is somewhat obscured by frequent digressions (every new character gets a lengthy background introduction), but a crucial point gets lost in the shuffle, only to reappear fleetingly at the conclusion: "The right fight to be in was the fight to make sure that everybody got a good education," Lemann writes, not to continue to prop up a system that creates one set of standards for privileged students and another set for the less privileged. If The Big Test had focused on that issue, where equal opportunity is genuinely at stake, instead of on the roots of standardized testing, where opportunity was explicitly intended only for a chosen few, it would be a substantially different book--one with a story that almost assuredly could be told as engrossingly as the story Lemann chose to tell, but perhaps with a sharper focus. --Ron Hogan

Book Description

What do we know about the history, origin, design, and purpose of the SAT? Who invented it, and why? How did it acquire such a prominent and lasting position in American education? The Big Test reveals the ideas, people, and politics behind a fifty-year-old utopian social experiment that changed this country. Combining vibrant storytelling, vivid portraiture, and thematic analysis, Lemann shows why this experiment did not turn out as planned. It did create a new elite, but it also generated conflict and tension—and America's best educated, most privileged people are now leaders without followers.

Drawing on unprecedented access to the Educational Testing Service’s archives, Lemann maintains that America’s meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and that it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly. His important study not only asks profound moral and political questions about the past and future of our society but also carries implications for current social and educational policy. As Brent Staples noted in his New York Times editorial column: “Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts announced that prospective students would no longer be required to submit SAT scores with their applications. . . . Holyoke's president, Joanne Creighton, was personally convinced by reading Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, which documents how the SAT became a tool for class segregation.”

All students of education, sociology, and recent U.S. history—especially those focused on testing, theories of learning, social stratification, or policymaking—will find this book fascinating and alarming.

Customer Reviews:

First 50 years of the SAT .......2007-07-06

I am revisiting (in 2007) this book because my alma mater, an engineering school, is making the SAT optional. This book has always been a favorite. Specifically, I loved the series of Atlantic Monthly articles, of many years ago, on which it was based. When assembled as a book, it suffered in that the last portion of the book deals with California's proposition 209. As mentioned in the one of the media review, it doesn't really fit. The original history content was researched over many years from original sources, and is essentially definitive. In this section Lemann is actually quite objective, although it is ultimately not difficult to figure out where he stands. He is an outspoken critic of the test. It is a shame that he didn't keep the two separate because a dispassionate history would have benefited both critics and proponents better.

Other reviewers have made clear that this is not a technical book on the test, and its correlation with college performance. Nor is it a "prep" book. I have read such books, and they have their place, but this is a real contribution to the subject. The history is not so much "secret" as it has simply been ignored. The relevance of a decades old story might not be immediately obvious, but it lies in how the form of the test follows from its original intended function. The test has changed much over the years, but its history still leaves an imprint on the present. Does its history invalidate the test? Is the history just interesting reading? Has the modern test made the transition to its contemporary use? The reader should decide. I don't think anyone will change their minds about the SAT after having read this book, even though that was a likely intention of Lemann. Strong opinions will remain unchanged. It is still a story worth reading if you are interested in the debate over the tests merits, regardless of your position.

What did I enjoy most? I love the story of why we have to use #2 pencils; the role of Truman in the SAT; the meeting of Henry Chauncy (of ETS) and Isabel Myers (of MBTI fame). I found the personalities fascinating. It is like Watson's The Double Helix in its interplay of characters, but in this case doing social science.

There is another related book, while quite academic in style, that is a nice companion to this if you liked the same aspects of the Lemann book as I did. JoAnne Brown's, "The Definition of a Profession".

entertaining, but lacks focus.......2006-05-13

It's a good (if spotty) read. It covers topics such as the development of intelligence/achievement testing (although could do more to explain the difference between the two) and its history in America. Lemann is at his best when he's talking about the philosophies that undergird the various views on testing, but he allows himself to get too far off into character portraits of figures in the battle over California's Prop 229, which takes the final third of the book. His coverage of 229, by the way, is decidedly one-sided, making protagonists out of the folks who wanted it defeated (and Affirmative Action preserved). By the time I reached the end of the book, I realized that it had been a fun read, but I was left wondering... what exactly was it about, really?

You are wrong.......2006-04-21

For the moron who wrote that they know "a couple of poor people who went to ivy league" schools, you are right; however, the poor are disproportionately underrepresented at these schools. Moreover, the wealthy are disproportionately overrepresented. Don't use the ol' "Bill O'Reilly" approach, use an informed and intelligent approach.

The Big Test - An interesting Book.......2006-04-21

The big test is a very interesting book. The author makes you feel as though the story concerns you. The author uniquely ties earlier chapters of the book to later chapters. For example, the story of how Mr. Kaplan started his test prep business is discussed in chapter 9. This is connected to the information in chapter 19.
I would recommend this book to college students. I think if students know the history of SAT and other standardized test, they will develop a different attitude about these tests.

De Tocqueville Would Find This Well Worth Reading.......2003-07-30

When my daughters were just beginning the college admissions process a mere three years ago, I had no idea how things had changed or why--and the degree to which my own experience of the process had become irrelevant. This book does much to make that all clear, in prose which smacks of Tom Wolfe and is peopled with fascinating vignettes of characters, known and unknown: from Presidents James Bryant Conant, Clark Kerr, and Kingman Brewster to Henry Chauncy, "Inky" Clark, and Molly Munger, just to name a few. Lemann's thesis is essentially one of good intentions gone painfully awry. The Ivy League and other highly selective colleges have been debrided of old families and old money, only to be replaced by the narrowly proficient and unduly ambitious. It's not a pretty picture and one wants to believe it less important than Lemann and many applicants and their parents think. Much of the book appeared in a series of articles in the New Yorker and, unfortunately, is not much better than the sum of its parts. But I still heartily recommend this book. It puts our elite in focus and gives perspective to one of the most debated issues of our time--affirmative action.

The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy

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The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
Nicholas Lemann
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000OXLBE2

THE BIG TEST: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.(Review) (book review): An article from: Childhood Education

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THE BIG TEST: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.(Review) (book review): An article from: Childhood Education
Leigh M. O'Brien
Manufacturer: Association for Childhood Education International
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Childhood Education, published by Association for Childhood Education International on March 22, 2001. The length of the article is 647 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: THE BIG TEST: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.(Review) (book review)
Author: Leigh M. O'Brien
Publication: Childhood Education (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2001
Publisher: Association for Childhood Education International
Volume: 77 Issue: 3 Page: 177

Article Type: Book Review

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Further Examination.(Review): An article from: American Scientist

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Further Examination.(Review): An article from: American Scientist

Manufacturer: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
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Binding: Digital

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Meritocracy, If You Can Keep It.(Review) (book review): An article from: Policy Review

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Meritocracy, If You Can Keep It.(Review) (book review): An article from: Policy Review
Rhoda Rabkin
Manufacturer: Hoover Institution Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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This digital document is an article from Policy Review, published by Hoover Institution Press on June 1, 2000. The length of the article is 2208 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Meritocracy, If You Can Keep It.(Review) (book review)
Author: Rhoda Rabkin
Publication: Policy Review (Refereed)
Date: June 1, 2000
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Page: 67

Article Type: Book Review

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Too much ado about testing.(scholastic aptitude test)(Review) (book reviews): An article from: Issues in Science and Technology

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Too much ado about testing.(scholastic aptitude test)(Review) (book reviews): An article from: Issues in Science and Technology
Kevin Finneran
Manufacturer: National Academy of Sciences
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Binding: Digital

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This digital document is an article from Issues in Science and Technology, published by National Academy of Sciences on December 22, 1999. The length of the article is 1673 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Too much ado about testing.(scholastic aptitude test)(Review) (book reviews)
Author: Kevin Finneran
Publication: Issues in Science and Technology (Refereed)
Date: December 22, 1999
Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
Volume: 16 Issue: 2 Page: 90

Article Type: Book Review

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The Big Test: The Secret History of The American Meritocracy

Manufacturer: Farrar Straus Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000I8D2NG

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Excellent Book

From his former Scoutmaster

The Atom is Our Friend

A great quick red

Very Interesting Story with Distractions from the Author

The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor
Ken Silverstein
Manufacturer: Villard
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Inside Mrs. B.'s Classroom : Courage, Hope, and Learning on Chicago's South Side

ASIN: 0812966600
Release Date: 2005-01-11

Book Description

Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science. While he was working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David’s obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his backyard garden shed.

Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the U.S. government and from industry experts. Following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation. His wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an environmental emergency that put his town’s forty thousand suburbanites at risk. The EPA ended up burying his lab at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah. This offbeat account of ambition and, ultimately, hubris has the narrative energy of a first-rate thriller.

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Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science, and his basement experiments -- building homemade fireworks, brewing moonshine, and concocting his own self-tanning lotion -- were more ambitious than those of other boys. While working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David's obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard garden shed.

In The Radioactive Boy Scout, veteran journalist Ken Silverstein recreates in brilliant detail the months of David's improbable nuclear quest. Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the U.S. government and from industry experts. (Ironically, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was his number one source of information.)

Scavenging antiques stores and junkyards for old-fashioned smoke detectors and gas lanterns -- both of which contain small amounts of radioactive material -- and following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation. His unsanctioned and wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an environmental catastrophe that put his town's forty thousand residents at risk and caused the EPA to shut down his lab and bury it at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah.

An outrageous account of ambition and, ultimately, hubris that sits comfortably on the shelf next to such offbeat science books as Driving Mr. Albert and stories of grand capers like Catch Me If You Can, The Radioactive Boy Scout is a real-life adventure with the narrative energy of a first-rate thriller.

"Anyone who has ever wondered what the neighborhood geek might be brewing up in his backyard should read The Radioactive Boy Scout. This is a riveting and disturbing story about the power of the teenage mind -- and the sparks that fly when a nuclear family melts down."
    DAVID KUSHNER, AUTHOR OF MASTERS OF DOOM

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Book.......2007-08-12

This is an excellent non-fiction quick read at just under 200 pages. It is a true story about a teenager, David Hahn, who ventured to build a nuclear breeder reactor with little protection from radioactivity. He used a potting shed as a laboratory and a few old college textbooks from his dad for knowledge on radioactive materials. David became increasingly secluded at school as he continued to experiment with dangerous chemistry. His grades dropped, and no one believed he could do anything to raise eyebrows. He ignored laws and cautions, obtaining many radioactive materials like beryllium, radium, polonium (210!), and americium to recreate the Curie couple's feats. He succeeded in creating a nuclear reactor but could not stop the increasing radioactivity, resulting in catastrophe. Finally, the federal government had to dismantle his reactor, as it was a great danger to people who lived near David.

I think this book is a worthy read. It is a fascinating story with great description. The author, Ken Silverstein, was very good at highlighting facts and things that happened in David's life that were related to his inspiration of building a nuclear reactor. However, I think Silverstein put a little too much history of atomic energy into the book. He is also slightly biased against nuclear power.

Overall, I think this book could have been written better, but still deserves a thumb up.

From his former Scoutmaster.......2007-08-05

I was David's scoutmaster when he was preparing for his Eagle Scout Board of Review. I was to contact five registered adult Scout leaders, who would comprise the Board. One prospective adult told me he could not sit on the Board, because "something happened".

I learned that David and some friends were stopped by the cavaliering Clinton Township (Michigan) Police, who were randomly stopping teens and searching their cars for stolen tires.

David was not allowed to keep his experiments in his stepmother's home, so he kept everything in his car trunk. The cops found no tires, but saw his stuff and overreacted.

Days later, David's father phoned and said that David would no longer pursue the Eagle Scout rank.

A month or so later, a man claiming to be a reporter phoned my home, wanting to do a telephone interview about David. After a few moments, I refused. There was something negative about the line of questioning.

As a Scout, David was always clean-cut, polite, and well-liked by the other boys. My take is that David had the scientific curiosity of a Tesla or Edison; not of an evil prankster.

David's father, like so many divorced and re-married men, walked a tightrope between caring for his son and appeasing a new bride.

As for Mr. Silverstein, he should keep his story factual, and keep his opinions about Scouting to the editorial pages.

The Atom is Our Friend.......2007-07-31

There's something not quite serious about The Radioactive Boy Scout. The book jacket has a cartoonish design and each page has a little atomic symbol by the page number. It's a small book, almost like a children's reader. It seemed to me as if it would be a quick, fun read.
Well, it was quick, all right. Author Ken Silverstein originally wrote this as an article for Harper's Magazine, according to the blurb. The article has been padded with several chapters on nuclear power, chemistry, and the history of the Boy Scouts. But The Radioactive Boy Scout is hardly a cartoon or a fun little story.

Although this is a story about how one teenager nearly built a nuclear reactor in his back yard, Silverstein wants us to know it is more than that. He emphasizes how David Hahn, the teenager, was neglected by his parents and not taken seriously by his teachers. If only someone had taken the time to take this boy under his wing, perhaps a near-disaster could have been averted. Certainly the fact that there was no disaster takes the edge off the story, but we already know what can happen when teenagers don't get the attention they need.

I enjoyed the main story as well as the chapters on science and the Boy Scouts. Silverstein describes how radium-based products were sold in the early 20th century as tonics, lotions, and even suppositories, to improve one's health. He recalls filmstrips (remember?) and pamphlets that cheerfully told us to "duck and cover" in the event of a nuclear explosion. He uses a hilarious passage from P.G. Wodehouse to illustrate a common view of the Boy Scouts in their early days.

Although I share most of Silverstein's opinions on federal government, the nuclear power industry, the Boy Scouts, and inattentive parents, I think the story would have been more effective if he had left his editorial comments out. Describing David's father as "pathologically oblivious" is unnecessary. True, but unnecessary.

A great quick red.......2007-06-20

I found this book to be an enjoyable quick read. The science was well explained for those who don't know about nuclear physics and chemistry. There was a good progression of the story with interruptions that you wanted to read to get the background science information on what exactly David was doing. I think everyone should read this book to get a realistic view of how people can have an influence on one life. I will digress a great deal if I start to point out the many life lessons packed into this book so I'll just leave with a recommendation. Read not to get a balanced viewpoint for we all have our slants; read to get another viewpoint and figure out what you are going to do with that new perspective.

Very Interesting Story with Distractions from the Author.......2007-06-15

The *story* is very interesting, but the author repeatedly annoyed me. As others have said, if he had stuck to the story, the book would have been much, much shorter. There was some useful background information about nuclear history and research, but there was also absolutely useless information thrown in as well. [...].

The author was also rather condescending toward David (the boy), his parents, and virtually anyone else who knew him, it seemed. I felt bad for David in particular. The author clearly interviewed him and got to know him somewhat, then he took quotations and used them in ways that David didn't intend for them to sound. And the general tone toward David seemed rather uncharitable. I think he realized this and tried to remedy it a bit in the epilogue, but it doesn't undo the rest of the book. I think that a better author could have conveyed the obvious, that David needed better direction, without the condescending tone.

In the end, I'm definitely glad that I read the book, but I find the author distasteful. I would have preferred to have read the book from someone who left less of their own personality stamped on the story. I would definitely like to know what David is doing now. He should start a blog.

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