Julia Child by Laura Shapiro

From Barnes & Noble

Like other biographies in the Penguin Lives series, Laura Shapiro's Julia Child is relatively brief (208 pages) and combines perceptive analysis with brisk timeline tracking. Shapiro's Child is more than a zany TV kitchen wizard or a brilliant eccentric with a sweet tooth; she is a vibrant though not unflawed woman who in many ways was a feminist before her time.

From the Publisher

The delicious life of one of the most beloved figures in twentiethcentury American culture-soon to be played by Meryl Streep in a major motion picture

With a swooping voice, an irrepressible sense of humor, and a passion for good food, Julia Child ushered in the nation's culinary renaissance. In Julia Child, award-winning food writer Laura Shapiro tells the story of Child's unlikely career path, from California party girl to coolheaded chief clerk in a World War II spy station to bewildered amateur cook and finally to the Cordon Bleu in Paris, the school that inspired her calling. A food lover who was quintessentially American, right down to her little-known recipe for classic tuna fish casserole, Shapiro's Julia Child personifies her own most famous lesson: that learning how to cook means learning how to live.

Entertainment Weekly

Laura Shapiro's life of Julia Child packs the oft-told story of the gregarious giantess into 181 taut pages. Raised in a wealthy family, Julia McWilliams chafed at the stuffy pastimes of her social set, joined the OSS, and, while working in Ceylon, met her husband, Paul Child. In 1948 the newlyweds moved to France, where Julia sampled a famously mind-blowing sole meunière - ''handsomely browned and still sputteringly hot under its coating of chopped parsley'' - and found her calling. What followed is legendary: the Cordon Bleu courses, the contentious work on the cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the popular TV shows. Shapiro digs beneath the familiar milestones, unearthing Child's shortcomings (she once called for the ''de-fagification'' of American cooking) and, more importantly, the source of her phenomenal appeal. People loved Julia because she was exuberant and unpretentious. Because when her tarte tatin collapsed, she patched it up and said, ''I think that actually makes a more interesting dessert.'' Because she licked the spoon, relished U.S. supermarkets, and did not reflexively sneer at McDonald's [indeed, she deemed the fries ''surprisingly good'']. A-

The New York Times - Dorothy Kalins

The length of Laura Shapiro's text is constrained by the elegantly slim format of the Penguin Lives series, yet this writer shows enormous grace and food savvy. Shapiro thinks hard about why Julia matters…Reading Shapiro reminds us how Julia Child taught us not just how to cook but how to think about food, a quality sorely missing from the work of the glib TV chefs who've followed her. Shapiro is alert to today's overhyped, foodie America, where cooking is fetishized but seldom understood. When she says of Julia, "One of her lasting gifts to the food world was to help make it a place where good minds could settle in for life," you can just picture her own good mind making itself at home.

Publishers Weekly

Shapiro's biography of Julia Child—one of America's most beloved personalities—is a short but comprehensive book, and the newest in the Penguin Lives series. Born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, Calif., in 1912, Child attended college and worked for the OSS in Asia during WWII, where she met her future husband. After marrying, they moved to Paris, which led her to cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu. Child had an appetite for learning as well as eating, one that soon developed into a desire to pass on the knowledge and skills—the love—she was acquiring. And in her late 30s, she found her calling. With two women who later coauthored her first book, she started her own cooking school; her class notes led to the cookbook, which eventually led to the television show. Her husband provided steady support, and Child learned of the value of trial and error and an ability to laugh at her mistakes. She was also patient: the cookbook was nearly a decade from conception to publication and the television show started equally shakily. In this wonderful short bio, Shapiro doesn't skimp on less-flattering aspects of her subject's life and personality (Child found homosexuality to be "a rude disruption in the natural order of things"). (Apr.)

Library Journal

The celebrated cook gets a nod from "Penguin Lives." Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Shapiro (Something from the Oven, 2004) offers a vivid biography of the 20th century's leading gourmand. Food wasn't very important to Julia Child when she was young. She grew up in California, eating the bland New England cuisine that her Massachusetts-born mother instructed the future chef to prepare. After attending Smith College, she meandered through the next decade, single, without a real career. In 1946, in part because she was trying to make herself more attractive to the man she would eventually marry, she took a cooking class. Child was not, Shapiro makes clear, a born chef: In the early days, chickens were blackened to a crisp; a duck exploded; bearnaise sauce congealed; brains dissolved into mush. As a new bride in France, floundering around for something meaningful to do, Child enrolled in more classes, this time at the Cordon Bleu. There, she learned to cook "with all her senses engaged . . . with a visceral understanding of raw ingredients." A career-teaching Americans how to cook-was born. Why was she so successful on TV, in an era when cooking shows weren't very popular? Because, says Shapiro, Child had no artifice. She was herself on television. She was also fabulously composed in the face of on-air kitchen disasters-as when a tarte tartin collapsed in a heap. Her informal charm and humor helped her accomplish one of her central goals-to demystify French cuisine, and convince Americans that they could, to borrow the title of her most famous book, master the art of French cooking. In Shapiro's hands, Child emerges as a steadfast, vigorous, analytical person. Shapiro has, in a brief book, made her subject truly come alive.

What People Are Saying

Barbara Kafka
Julia Child was a witty, mesmerizing and authoritative writer. Laura Shapiro has written a life in every way worthy of this formidable woman. All who enjoy food or simply relish strong personalities should read it. (Barbara Kafka, author Vegetable Love)

Patricia Wells
Laura Shapiro has written a gift of a book, a true love poem to our beloved Julia. Her prose is lively, elegant, tactile, and she perfectly captures all of Julia's memorable traits. We feel that Julia is there at our side, cooking, coaxing, being as blunt and honest as can be. (Patricia Wells, author The Provence Cookbook)

Dorie Greenspan
Laura Shapiro's biography of Julia Child is as bright, smart, funny, charming and companionable as Julia herself. I read the book from cover-to-cover with a smile on my face, remembering my friend and reveling in the stories that are so quintessentially, quirkily Julia - then I read the book again. (Dorie Greenspan, author of Baking with Julia and Baking, From My Home to Yours)

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