If you are like me and love food, watching Top Chef and Food Channel, think that cooking is art, an outlet for creativity, consider chefs featured on such shows (including Anthony Bourdain) as super-sophisticated artists, you are up for a surprise with this book. Bourdain captures the world of restaurants and professionally cooked food in all its theatrical, demented glory. Bourdain reeked of privilege that was topped off by an expletive-laced attitude coming from a drug-addicted snob. In Paris, we stayed at the Hôtel Lutétia, then a large, slightly shabby old pile on Boulevard Haussmann.

From a foodie perspective, he's focused on proteins and presentation: it was surprising to me that he recommended a solid chef's knife for the home cook, but not necessarily a paring knife (essential, imo, for delicate fruit and veggie work). Whereas women's collective culture is often based on opening up sincerely about things on which either a) I probably feel or experience differently from everyone else there, and about which I learned half a lifetime ago that I CBA with the weird looks and silences, or b) I don't want to share with people like that, and definitely not in a group.I loved that he reads the audiobook, because hearing his inflection and emphasis made me know when he was being serious and when he was being sarcastic. All the neighborhood kids thought I knew Steve McQueen and John Wayne personally-as an American, it was assurned we were all pals, that we hung out together on the range, riding,horses and gunning down miscreants-so I enjoyed a certain celebrity right away. Let it suffice to say that by age eighteen I was a thoroughly undisciplined young man, blithely flunking or fading out of college (I couldn't be bothered to attend classes). He was like that girl you know in class but have never given much real attention to (only later to discover she is witty, wicked, and everything you want in a lover and fear in a daughter). The only problem from a writing point of view is that sometimes the main narrative of Bourdain's progress through the industry seems confused, missing sections, which isn’t helped by some of the aside chapters falling out of chronology with the main narrative, confusing me at points.

Blah, blah, blah, drugs blah, blah, fuck everyone, pork chop, fuck you all, mince, veal, drugs, blood, blah, blah, blah. I spent most of my waking hours drinking, smoking pot, scheming, and doing my best to amuse, outrage, impress and penetrate anyone silly enough to find me entertaining. It came as a particular blow as somebody who enjoyed eating, traveling and writing in equal amounts. Bourdain has cited George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), with its behind-the-scenes examination of the restaurant business in 1920s Paris, as an important influence on the book's themes and tone. His voice is as vibrant as ever, his eye for the delicious and the shocking coming through on every page.The beaches, while no good for swimming, were studded with old Nazi blockhouses and gun emplacements, many still bearing visible bullet scars and the scorch of flamethrowers, and there were tunnels under the dunes-all very cool for a little kid to explore.