Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I’ll stick to my TV Bourdain

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

by Leave a Comment

Anthony Bourdain was one of my travel heroes and his suicide several years ago still guts me (while reminding me that people who look like they have everything you could want may still be very unhappy). I have never read any of his work before but I love his voice and attitude, which is to say: my expectations for this book were high. Kitchen Confidential was published in 2000 and was a bestseller. It is Bourdain’s memoir of working in the food industry, divided into […]

The Bobby Gold Stories

The Bobby Gold Stories by Anthony Bourdain

by Leave a Comment

A collection of short stories or perhaps a novel in story form about a restaurant bouncer/mob enforcer. I haven’t read anything by Anthony Bourdain before and certainly not his fiction. I was surprised when someone not primarily known for fiction writing, writes fiction, and it feels like fiction that comes together in a way that is enjoyable. Maybe my standards are too low for that kind of thing, but given how easily something like this could become a vanity project/ego trip. The stories themselves circulate […]

I still miss you, Tony (CBR12Bingo 2: shelfie)

Bone in the Throat by Anthony Bourdain

by Leave a Comment

I love books about cooking, the science behind making food, and the nitty gritty of the restaurant, farming, and food complex industries. So imagine my delight when I saw an Anthony Bourdain book I hadn’t heard about, much less read. I loved The Nasty Bits, I’ve followed Bourdain since Kitchen Confidential, his take no prisoners style and strong opinions never made him fall prey to the elitism of others in the chef cult of personality (looking your way, Michael Pollan). I couldn’t wait to read […]

HAVE FUN WITH ALL YOUR CROWNS

Dance Nation by Clare Barron

Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview by Anthony Bourdain

Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts

by 1 Comment

I find myself in one of those moods where I can’t figure out if I should take a deep dive into the not so fun introspection my brain is trying to take me through or if I should avoid it. While taking the deep dive feels worse, at least it confronts it as opposed to trying to avoid it and hoping for the best! I hate holidays because I don’t like strong feelings of any sense and there’s a kind of collective pressure to do […]

Transforming the Mundane to the Magical

by Leave a Comment

While I was not a Bourdain mega-fan prior to his death, I did always appreciate and respect him as someone striving to live an authentic life. He seemed to take a lot of joy out of wandering, and to have little patience for artifice. I like that. Another of his goals seems to have been to get people to veer off of their normally trodden paths and to try something new, just to see what was out there. Even though we’re very different kinds of […]

Cookbook, picture book, and goodbye

by 3 Comments

Like a lot of people upon hearing of the sudden and unexpected death of Anthony Bourdain, I decided to read some of his work. I’d read Kitchen Confidential several years ago, so I didn’t feel the need to re-read that (plus, there were quite a few holds on the local library copies already). What was rather surprisingly available was his last cookbook Appetites; this worked well for me since I’d never read one of his cookbooks before. Appetites is written by the same opinionated fearless […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo