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The Remarkable Life of Julia Child
Knopf
August 2012
On Sale: August 7, 2012
Featuring: Julia Child
557 pages
ISBN: 0307272222
EAN: 9780307272225
Kindle: B007MDDDRU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
It’s rare for someone to emerge in America who can change
our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture. It’s even
rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot
three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting
public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV
station. And yet, that’s exactly what Julia Child
did. The warble-voiced doyenne of television cookery
became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule-breaker as she
touched off the food revolution that has gripped America for
more than fifty years.
Now, in Bob Spitz’s
definitive, wonderfully affectionate biography, the Julia we
know and love comes vividly — and surprisingly — to
life. In Dearie, Spitz employs the same skill
he brought to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book
The Beatles, providing a clear-eyed portrait
of one of the most fascinating and influential Americans of
our time — a woman known to all, yet known by only a
few.
At its heart, Dearie is a story about a
woman’s search for her own unique expression. Julia
Child was a directionless, gawky young woman who ran off
halfway around the world to join a spy agency during World
War II. She eventually settled in Paris, where she
learned to cook and collaborated on the writing of what
would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a
book that changed the food culture of America.
She was already fifty when The French Chef went on
the air — at a time in our history when women weren’t
making those leaps. Julia became the first educational
TV star, virtually launching PBS as we know it today; her
marriage to Paul Child formed a decades-long love story that
was romantic, touching, and quite extraordinary.
A
fearless, ambitious, supremely confident woman, Julia took
on all the pretensions that embellished tony French cuisine
and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for
everything that has happened since in American cooking, from
TV dinners and Big Macs to sea urchin foam and the Food
Channel. Julia Child’s story, however, is more than
the tale of a talented woman and her sumptuous craft.
It is also a saga of America’s coming of age and growing
sophistication, from the Depression Era to the turbulent
sixties and the excesses of the eighties to the greening of
the American kitchen. Julia had an effect on and was
equally affected by the baby boom, the sexual revolution,
and the start of the women’s liberation movement.
On the centenary of her birth, Julia finally gets the
biography she richly deserves. An in-depth, intimate
narrative, full of fresh information and insights,
Dearie is an entertaining, all-out adventure story of
one of our most fascinating and beloved figures.
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