Amy Scribner

NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Once I Was You

Review by Amy Scribner

In Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa offers a searing, clear-eyed account of growing up in America after she emigrated from Mexico as an infant. Weaving her own life story with key milestones in U.S. immigration history, she produces a brave examination of the United States’ shortcomings.

Written in Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice, Once I Was You is, quite simply, beautiful. 

Hinojosa’s family traveled to the U.S. so her father could work as a researcher at the University of Chicago. When she was a child, they would drive from their home in Hyde Park into Chicago to see the big city, where Hinojosa would gaze at public housing developments, “massive brown cement towers, twenty floors of fencing around balconies and doors. No windows. I wondered why they had no windows even though they were built overlooking this beautiful lake. It seemed like a purposeful punishment.” It was an early glimpse into the inequities of racism to which Hinojosa would devote her journalistic career.

Hinojosa moved to New York City to study at Barnard College, where she found her voice as a radio host at the college station, cementing her career path. She took jobs at NPR, CNN, CBS and PBS, where she produced pieces that celebrated diversity and shone a light on immigration issues, including a groundbreaking report on “Frontline” about the immigration industrial complex and physical and sexual abuse at detention centers. She developed PTSD from the countless interviews she conducted with detainees, who told her stories of their horrific treatment.

As Hinojosa reported these stories, she maintained the objectivity that’s so crucial to journalists’ credibility, but she also kept close her own immigrant experience and her belief that America is long overdue for a reckoning. “My husband [the artist German Pérez] says that the reason this is so hard for me is because I believed in the promise of this country,” Hinojosa writes. “I bought into the exceptionalism. It’s hard to accept how ornery and normal and mediocre this country really is. I thought we were better than this. But we aren’t.”

Once I Was You is, quite simply, beautiful. Written in Hinojosa’s honest, passionate voice, this memoir takes readers on a journey through one immigrant’s experience. Hinojosa was able to realize the American dream, but she urges us not to look away from all the others for whom America is a nightmare.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Maria Hinojosa reveals what it was like to narrate her memoir’s audiobook: “I am the character, she is me!”

In Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America, Latina journalist Maria Hinojosa offers a searing, clear-eyed account of growing up in America after she emigrated from Mexico as an infant. Weaving her own life story with key milestones…

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Comeback

Review by Amy Scribner

Grace Turner was a rising Hollywood star, a beautiful actor taken under the wing of legendary director and writer Able Yorke. As her fame grows, so does Able’s control over her. He molds her into the perfect starlet, but behind the scenes, his growing manipulation and verbal abuse spiral into something even darker.

“He wanted Marilyn without the overdose, Winona without the shoplifting, Gwyneth without the health shit,” Grace explains in the novel. “I was untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling down a path to immortality so rapidly, so immaculately, that not one person stopped to question how it all worked so well, a fortysomething man and a teenager being so inextricably linked.”

By the time she’s 21, Grace is addicted to vodka and pills. On the eve of her first awards season, Grace steps away from the spotlight, fleeing first to her parents’ home in unfashionable Anaheim, California, then to a moldy Malibu beach house in the shadow of Able’s home. The paparazzi flock to capture her dazed, disheveled appearance as she adjusts to living on her own for the first time in her life. A trip to the gas station to buy food—dill-flavored potato chips, a pack of Babybel cheese, water and a slice of pizza (she doesn’t know how to cook)—is like throwing bread crumbs to seagulls. Soon photos of her are plastered across gossip websites, and Grace is at a crossroads: Will she be a Hollywood cautionary tale, or a comeback story?

The similarities to Harvey Weinstein are inescapable, but in an author’s note, Ella Berman writes that she began the novel months before the New York Times and The New Yorker began publishing bombshell revelations about the disgraced megaproducer’s history of mistreatment and sexual assault. The Comeback flirts with but never devolves into a formulaic revenge plot, which would cheapen what turns out to be a surprising and satisfying story. First-time novelist Berman deftly captures the entertainment industry in all its fickleness and offers a complex, compassionate portrait of the lasting scars of abuse and trauma.

The similarities to Harvey Weinstein are inescapable, but in an author’s note, Ella Berman writes that she began the novel months before the New York Times and the New Yorker began publishing bombshell revelations about the disgraced megaproducer’s history of mistreatment and sexual assault.
NonfictionMemoir

Grand

Review by Amy Scribner

“My social media would tell you I was a working comedian with hobbies, love, a close family, and important opinions on trending topics,” author Sara Schaefer confides in her powerful memoir, Grand. “But inside, there was this impossibly tight knot, hissing at me, suffocating me, sucking the joy out of almost everything I did.”

Schaefer is a successful comedian who has worked for Jimmy Fallon and hosted a talk show on MTV with fellow comedian Nikki Glaser. In Grand, she toggles between her childhood in Midlothian, Virginia, and a 40th-birthday Grand Canyon rafting trip with her younger sister. 

For most of her early years, Schaefer and her three siblings lived a privileged life as the children of a lawyer and a stay-at-home mom. Her parents both drove Porsches. Her mom’s closet was “a jungle of textures: beads, suede, fur, silk.” Their Christmases featured mountains of presents. But after Schaefer and her siblings learned that their dad had misappropriated his clients’ funds, their family’s opulent lifestyle was replaced by low-paying jobs as they rebuilt their lives and repaid their debts. 

The rafting trip is a way for Schaefer to face her fears, both literally (she is afraid of water) and spiritually (she hasn’t fully grieved the death of her mom a decade earlier). Schaefer and her sister travel through Class VIII rapids and learn how to check their campsite for scorpions before bedtime. All the while, Schaefer’s writing is radiant, whether she’s describing the wonder of the Grand Canyon or her early years as a stand-up comedian in New York City. She tells her story with a generosity that never lapses into sentimentality.

“The sound of the rushing river canceled out all the other sounds,” she writes of her first night sleeping in the canyon. “I thanked the universe for this moment, made peace with my demons, and finally became one with nature. I fell into a deep, soul-restoring sleep. Just kidding—I tossed and turned and cussed for six hours straight.” The melding of humor and pain makes Grand a fresh and engaging read. It is a wise, funny acknowledgment that we are not always in control—and that growth is most likely to happen when we let go.

“My social media would tell you I was a working comedian with hobbies, love, a close family, and important opinions on trending topics,” author Sara Schaefer confides in her powerful memoir, Grand. “But inside, there was this impossibly tight knot, hissing at me, suffocating me,…

FictionComic Fiction

Sex and Vanity

Review by Amy Scribner

The title of bestselling author Kevin Kwan’s blazingly fun new novel is a bit of a misnomer: There’s very little sex. But that’s not what we go to the author of Crazy Rich Asians for, is it? What Kwan consistently delivers—and does so again in Sex and Vanity—are fantastic tales of the over-the-top wealthy, written with just enough empathy to make us care about young, beautiful trust-fund billionaires.

Meet Lucie Tang Churchill. She’s the beautiful daughter of a Mayflower descendant and a Chinese American from Seattle. On her lily-white paternal side, Lucie has always been the outcast. Although she’s a born-and-bred New Yorker, her patrician grandmother still calls her an offensive slang term for a subservient Chinese woman.

When Lucie travels to Italy for the extravagant wedding of a childhood friend, she meets George Zao, a handsome surfer from Hong Kong. Lucie and George get caught in a compromising position at the wedding, and they sheepishly go their separate ways.

Fast-forward five years, and Lucie is a successful art consultant engaged to Cecil Pike, a Texas oil heir and a “GQ-handsome bon vivant.” But Lucie’s family looks down their noses at Cecil’s new money, and Cecil’s family looks right back at Lucie the same way. It’s clear Lucie and Cecil are an odd match—to everyone except Lucie and Cecil. And when George reemerges, Lucie begins to question everything she thought she wanted.

Sex and Vanity is a deliciously fun romp from Capri to Manhattan and East Hampton. Kwan is in fine form, gleefully name-dropping luxury brands and socialites as he spins a heartfelt, satirical tale that observes the price of fame, fortune and following your heart.

What Kevin Kwan consistently delivers—and does so again in Sex and Vanity—are fantastic tales of the over-the-top wealthy, written with just enough empathy to make us care about young, beautiful trust-fund billionaires.

FictionComic Fiction

Last Tang Standing

Review by Amy Scribner

It is a truth universally acknowledged that mothers will meddle in their daughters’ love lives. For Andrea Tang, a successful 33-year-old lawyer in Singapore, that truism extends to her aunties, cousins and anyone else who can claim relation to her. She may have graduated first in her class in law school and now owns her condo despite the sky-high housing prices, but what everyone wants to know is, when will she get married?

After ending a long-term relationship, Andrea feels the pressure to find The One while also putting in as many billable hours as possible to secure a partnership in her prestigious law firm. Her friends offer her their support, from signing her up for Tinder to inviting her to a rich people’s version of book club (i.e., no discernible conversation about the assigned book, lots of champagne and sashimi). At the book club, Andrea meets Eric, an Indonesian hotelier. He’s older, wealthy and quickly makes his move.

But Andrea can’t stop thinking about Suresh, her officemate and competition for law firm partner. He’s annoying, engaged to a beautiful but domineering Londoner and not at all Andrea’s type. Except that he’s exactly her type. When Eric wants to take their relationship to the next level, Andrea has to decide whether a future of wealth and comfort wins over listening to her heart.

Author Lauren Ho is a former legal adviser, and her debut novel is a blast. Andrea is a relatable, laugh-out-loud protagonist, a high achiever who also gives in to her weaker instincts on occasion. Last Tang Standing is a near-perfect blend of Crazy Rich Asians and Bridget Jones’s Diary, yet it still feels wholly original.

 

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Lauren Ho is a former attorney.

Author Lauren Ho is a former attorney, and her debut novel is a blast. Andrea is a relatable, laugh-out-loud protagonist, a high achiever who also gives in to her weaker instincts on occasion. Last Tang Standing is a near-perfect blend of Crazy Rich Asians and Bridget Jones’s Diary, yet it still feels wholly original.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Redhead by the Side of the Road

Review by Amy Scribner

Micah Mortimer is a single, middle-aged man whose life is governed by routine. On Mondays, he mops his floors. Fridays are for vacuuming. He runs every morning. He lives alone, managing an apartment building. And he finds most people perplexing. “Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.”

Micah’s carefully calibrated world is upended when he returns from his morning run to find a teenage boy named Brink on his stoop. Brink is the son of Micah’s college girlfriend, and he is convinced Micah is his father. They quickly determine the math makes that scenario impossible, but Brink lingers. He’s gotten into some trouble in college and is reluctant to go home and face his parents. Brink’s presence triggers a chain of events that threaten not only Micah’s daily routine but also his entire carefully structured life. Soon he finds himself rethinking his place in the world.

Not a word is wasted in this slim, beautiful novel. Reading Anne Tyler is always pure pleasure, and Redhead by the Side of the Road is the author at her best. This joyful book is a powerful reminder of how much we need human connection.

Not a word is wasted in this slim, beautiful novel. Reading Anne Tyler is always pure pleasure, and Redhead by the Side of the Road is the author at her best.
NonfictionHumorEssays

Wow, No Thank You.

Review by Amy Scribner

The ability to write 240 witty characters on social media does not necessarily translate to being someone whose books you want to read. But that’s what happened with Samantha Irby, whom I first knew as the person consistently killing it on Twitter, making me laugh out loud with her tweets on “Judge Mathis” and “Succession.” (She’s obsessed with both.)

It was later that I realized she also writes stunningly astute, hilarious essays about topics both serious (becoming a stepmother) and less so (her slightly lazy beauty rituals). But like all the best essayists, Irby brings deeper insights to even her most lighthearted work.

In “Girls Gone Mild,” Irby reflects on her extreme reluctance to go out, now that she’s rounding the corner to 40: “Remember when you could be roused from a night being spent on the couch in your pajamas, curled around a pint of Chubby Hubby, and goaded into joining your friends at the bar even though you’d already taken off your bra? Yeah, I can’t either, but I know those days existed. I have the liver damage to prove it.” By the end of the essay, Irby has made peace with her new slower pace of life. It’s simultaneously funny and poignant, as are all the entries in this unflinching collection. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Samantha Irby discusses moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan, working in Hollywood and writing her newest book, Wow, No Thank You.

Perhaps the most powerful is “Body Negativity,” in which Irby catalogs the many ways women are expected to perform upkeep on our appearances so we have glowing skin, flowing eyelashes, smooth foreheads and snow-white teeth. But guess what? Irby has discovered that, unless it makes you feel good, none of that really matters: “I have threaded, I have microbladed, I have trimmed, I have tinted, I have filled in, I have styled, I have contoured, and I have microfeathered my stupid eyebrows, and none of those things has ever had a discernible impact on my life. Now I do nothing, and it’s fine!”

Frankly, Irby’s radically honest writing in Wow, No Thank You. makes me feel better—or at least less bad—about myself. She gives a welcome voice to what so many women in 2020 are feeling: overleveraged, underappreciated, exhausted, bloated—but hopeful. 

The ability to write 240 witty characters on social media does not necessarily translate to being someone whose books you want to read. But that’s what happened with Samantha Irby, whom I first knew as the person consistently killing it on Twitter, making me laugh…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Lost Diary of M

Review by Amy Scribner

She appears in pop culture occasionally—in movies, TV and podcasts. But for the most part, Mary Pinchot Meyer has been lost to history.

Remembered mainly as John F. Kennedy’s longtime lover and confidant, Meyer was more than just a mistress. She was an accomplished painter. She experimented with LSD with Timothy Leary. She was a popular socialite in the 1960s Georgetown scene, into which she was introduced by her ex-husband, a CIA senior leader. A free spirit, Meyer unapologetically embraced the sexual revolution.

Less than a year after JFK’s assassination, Meyer was shot to death while on her daily walk along the Washington, D.C., waterfront. Her murder was never solved, and rumors swirled about whether her affair and her outspoken advocacy for psychedelic drugs placed her on the wrong side of power.

In his memoir, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee—who was Meyer’s brother-in-law—alludes to a secret diary she may have left behind. This trippy, intriguing novel imagines what this long-rumored diary might contain. DC luminaries like Katharine Graham and Joe Alsop drift into the pages as Meyer describes the boozy parties that gave shape to her days: “Many things transpire at parties in Georgetown. Cases of hard liquor flow without end. Assignations occur secretly in walk-in closets and pantries. An Amazon River of gossip, rumor, truth, and untruth flows through the conversations of men who run the government, men who spy, men who scribble opinions in newsprint, and all the women who accompany them, like mothers overseeing an alcoholic playground.”

Written in spare, foreboding entries, The Lost Diary of M takes a fresh look at a woman whose mysterious death will likely never be solved. Author Paul Wolfe takes great care with his subject, painting a nuanced, never sensationalized picture of a complex woman.

Written in spare, foreboding entries, The Lost Diary of M takes a fresh look at a woman whose mysterious death will likely never be solved. Author Paul Wolfe takes great care with his subject, painting a nuanced, never sensationalized picture of a complex woman.

FictionFamily Saga

House of Trelawney

Review by Amy Scribner

The Trelawney estate in Cornwall is much like the Trelawney family itself: sprawling, ancient and crumbling. Once among the most breathtaking estates in Britain, it has fallen into disrepair as the Trelawney fortune disappears. Ivy and moss grow through the walls of what were once grand ballrooms. Greenhouses around the property lie in collapsed heaps. Most of the formerly extensive art collection has been sold off, leaving shameful empty patches on the castle walls. As author Hannah Rothschild writes, “As the centuries tripped by, the Earls of Trelawney, their senses and ambition dulled by years of pampered living, failed to develop other skills. Of the twenty-four earls, the last eight had been dissolute and bereft of any business acumen. Their financial ineptitude, along with two world wars, the Wall Street crash, three divorces and inheritance taxes, had dissipated the family’s fortune.” 

As has been the tradition for centuries, Kitto promptly kicks his sister, Blaze, out of the castle when he is named the 24th Earl of Trelawney. The hapless Kitto, who is virtually devoid of employable skills or interests, lives in the castle with his wife, Jane, whose own sizable inheritance has been sunk into the lost cause of maintaining Trelawney. 

Blaze, sent packing with little cash and no plan, has remade herself as an uber-successful financial investor in London. Beautiful, ruthless and utterly lonely, Blaze hasn’t spoken to the family in years. But when an unexpected heir turns up, the family is forced to reengage and find a way to save the house of Trelawney.

Rothschild, author of The Improbability of Love and The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild, is also an accomplished film director and a member of that Rothschild clan (the banking one). Her understanding of the eccentric world of English aristocrats shines throughout this remarkably entertaining novel. Her writing is whimsical yet poignant as she examines how privilege can become a burden, and how an inheritance system so focused on men impacts the women drawn into it. Consider an elderly male relative who marvels at the survival instincts of a young Trelawney woman who is single-mindedly focused on marrying someone wealthy: “He’d never understood women; men were so simple by comparison. Centuries of absolute power had dulled the male brain, whereas women, forced for so long to cajole and manipulate, had evolved into far more complex and capable beings.”

Part comedy of manners, part serious meditation on money and gender roles, House of Trelawney is both deeply thought-provoking and thoroughly fun. 

Part comedy of manners, part serious meditation on money and gender roles, House of Trelawney is both deeply thought-provoking and thoroughly fun. 

NonfictionBiography

You Never Forget Your First

Review by Amy Scribner

He is singular among American heroes: Founding Father, truth-teller, brave but reluctant military leader. In the insightful and entertaining You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe moves past the well-worn tropes we’ve come to associate with George Washington. Her nuanced portrait paints a man torn between service to country and family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Alexis Coe.

Born to Augustine and Mary Washington on a modest farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, George was the oldest of six. Augustine died when George was just 11 years old. With a modest inheritance and no money for education, George learned responsibility at an early age. At 17, he became the surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest ever, and began buying land. A natural leader, he became a major in the Virginia military by 21 and caught the eye of British Governor Dinwiddie, who sent him on a mission to expel French settlers from the Ohio territory. These were his earliest forays into what would become a lifetime of public service. 

Washington’s story is as well documented as anyone’s in American history. Yet Coe, a former research curator for the New York Public Library, finds fresh angles from which to examine him. And she doesn’t shy away from the most troubling aspect of Washington’s legacy: When he died, he owned 123 slaves. The museum at Mount Vernon claims Washington freed all the people he enslaved in his 1799 will. While that is technically true, Coe points out that their emancipation was not automatic upon his death. Even worse, many of the people enslaved by Washington had married those enslaved by Martha, so even when they were emancipated, their loved ones were not.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Coe writes with style and humor (one chapter opens with the line “Great love stories don’t often begin with dysentery”). You Never Forget Your First reminds us of the importance of public service and diplomacy, and Coe makes colonial history not just fascinating but relevant.

In the insightful and entertaining You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe moves past the well-worn tropes we’ve come to associate with George Washington.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Kill Reply All

Review by Amy Scribner

Be honest: Have you ever been guilty of phubbing? Have you ever been Tindstagrammed? Do you often show off your #ootd?

Now really be honest: Do you know what any of those things are? Because I sure didn’t before reading Kill Reply All, a clever and informative guide to online etiquette by Victoria Turk, a senior editor at Wired magazine. (For the record, “phubbing” is snubbing someone in favor of your phone, “Tindstagramming” is stalking someone on Instagram after they rejected you on Tinder, and “#ootd” is a tag used when you post a picture of your outfit of the day.)

Living in the digital age is confusing. By now, most of us know the subtext of the eggplant emoji and understand that using punctuation in our texts is a sure sign we’re old. Still, navigating the online world is complicated. To make things simpler, Turk divides her practical and straightforward advice into four categories: work, romance, friendship and community. Turk’s Marie Kondo-like approach to email inbox management may actually make you excited to tackle those 1,500 unread messages.

The section on online romance—from choosing a photo for your dating app profile to avoiding “some of the invasive species that have made online dating their habitat”—is fairly specific. Not everyone needs a tutorial on online flirting, but for those who do, Turk’s hilarious pointers on what your dating bio really says about you are not to be missed. (When someone is “adventurous,” it means they “did a gap year.”)

Probably the most useful section is the chapter on how to behave in different online communities. The rules vary, and so will your persona. (Think of how you present yourself on Twitter versus LinkedIn.) This chapter offers ample food for thought on how to artfully unfriend someone on Facebook, when it’s appropriate to tag someone on Twitter and how to make a meme. 

At the end of the day, we all fall prey to online pitfalls. The trick is to use your best judgment, use emojis sparingly and, for the love of God, don’t accidentally like a photo when you’re stalking your ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page.

Be honest: Have you ever been guilty of phubbing? Have you ever been Tindstagrammed? Do you often show off your #ootd? Now really be honest: Do you know what any of those things are? You will after reading this clever and informative guide to online etiquette.
FictionThriller

A Good Man

Review by Amy Scribner

Much has been discussed in recent years about what it means to be a man in modern America: the belief that men should be masculine yet tender, chivalrous yet feminist, strong yet vulnerable. In the chillingly good A Good Man, debut novelist Ani Katz examines what happens when the weight of expectations comes crashing down on one family. 

Thomas Martin was raised in the nightmarish tangle of an abusive home, where his father took out his disappointment on his children. After his father dies, Thomas becomes the man of the house, working his way through college and up the corporate ladder. He provides for his mother and younger sisters, who still live together in semi-squalor because they don’t know any other way.

Thomas is wary of bringing Miriam, the beautiful Parisian woman he plans to marry, to his family home, where she “would notice the skid marks of dried grease around the rims of the plates, the crusty residue at the bottom of our tumblers.” It’s as if every grubby object reflects upon him and his shame-filled childhood.

When it comes time to make his own family, Thomas is determined to attain perfection and nothing less. “We were two of a kind, my wife and I,” he says. “If my life up to that point had been like an old and battered house, she wanted to rip the rot from the rooms, banish the bad memories, throw open the windows, and fill the place with light and air and the breath of the future.” 

They buy a Dutch colonial home outside Manhattan and have a daughter. Thomas makes more money and drives his daughter to private school in a Mercedes S-Class sedan. Miriam struggles with postpartum depression and suburban isolation, but they work through it.

Everything is perfect—and yet. His relationship with Miriam is fraying. Their daughter is filled with the ennui of a typical preteen. When Thomas makes a catastrophically bad decision at work, he finds everything he’s worked for evaporating around him.

This is when A Good Man—infused with a low-grade dread from the very first page—takes a seriously sinister turn. The full impact of Thomas’ childhood trauma comes into focus as he retraces how things went so wrong and admits he may not be the most reliable narrator. 

Katz has delivered a whip-smart, beautifully written meditation on marriage, masculinity and the thin line between happiness and disaster.

Ani Katz has delivered a whip-smart, beautifully written meditation on marriage, masculinity and the thin line between happiness and disaster.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

The Book of Eating

Review by Amy Scribner

In The Book of Eating, longtime New York magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt offers a delicious peek behind the scenes of a storied career.

A diplomat’s son who grew up eating the best dumplings, ramen and dim sum Asia had to offer, Platt clearly loves food. But unlike his famous peers, such as Ruth Reichl, A.J. Liebling and Craig Claiborne, Platt doesn’t take too seriously his role as one of the “serious restaurant critics . . . still operating under the ancient, slightly tattered Kabuki rituals of the trade, with our ironic faux reservation names, our dwindling expense accounts, and our discreet though mostly useless disguises.”

He knows he has the rare luck of being a professional eater, and his love for and slight amazement at his job come across in this riot of a book.

While much of The Book of Eating focuses on Platt’s decades at the magazine, the most mouth-watering chapters focus on his childhood living in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He and his brothers were raised on traditional Asian meals, which he recalls all these years later with delightful clarity: “Communal beef and lamb barbecue buffet tossed with scallions and different sauces by the cooks on a giant, curving, charcoal-heated brazier and then served, with messy ceremony, between fresh-baked sesame seed buns.”

Platt dishes a genteel helping of gossip about the New York restaurant scene, where chefs and restaurant owners are not afraid to speak their minds. The “mercurial king of the New York brasserie, Keith McNally,” did not take kindly to a mediocre review of his new pizzeria, writing in an open letter that Platt was bald, overweight and out-of-touch. (Though it should be noted this was mild compared to what Mario Batali said about Platt, which cannot be repeated here but is the colorful name of a very funny chapter in the book.)

Platt’s greatest insights come when he ponders the evolving role of the restaurant critic. He writes that, “after the social media meteor obliterated the old ways of doing almost everything, those of us who’d managed, by some divine miracle, to survive the waves of magazine shutterings and print media layoffs, not to mention the clickbait food crazes that seemed to sweep over the landscape like biblical plagues every week, were adapting to our new environment the best we could.”

Restaurant critics may have to compete these days with top 10 listicles and filtered Instagram photos of your cousin’s brunch, but Platt delivers a generous, hilarious case for the restaurant critic’s enduring significance.

In The Book of Eating, longtime New York magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt offers a delicious peek behind the scenes of a storied career.

A diplomat’s son who grew up eating the best dumplings, ramen and dim sum Asia had to offer, Platt clearly loves…

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