OP: MFK Fisher, Julia Child & Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table
Shipping calculated at checkout
Harmony Books, New York, 1994. Hardcover. Very Good. First printing.
M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters, all household names, are easily identified as tastemakers who shaped America’s evolving relationship with gastronomy from the mid-twentieth century and onward.
Biographer Joan Reardon, in her 1994 book on all three women, gives us a little taste of their lives and their impact. (She would also later publish a full-length book on M.F.K. Fisher and lend her editing skills to Julia Child’s published letters in As Always, Julia [2010]).
Drawing from personal interviews, letters, and papers, Reardon begins with the women’s shared love of France and its “culinary seduction” of them, then launches into a brief, career-focused biography of each. Though Reardon doesn’t belabor the point, the similarities among the three stories are compelling.
Fisher, Child, and Waters have written their own memoirs and been profiled ad infinitum, but this outside perspective is an advantage to sallying beyond polished, PR-ready facades and placing the human, not the star, in the context of their unedited lives. A great introduction to these highly influential individuals.
Ours is a Very Good first printing. Lightly shelfworn with a price clipped jacket. Hardcover.
