Bone in the Throat by Anthony Bourdain Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Bone in the Throat
Book Review: Love Anthony Bourdain.
Summary: 5 Stars
Bone In the Throat is a great read -- atmospheric and full of quirky characters. Plenty of inside stuff about the New York restaurant scene, which Bourdain obviously knows like the master chef he is. Couldn't put it down, so read it straight through, and was very sorry to finish. Looking forward to more fiction by Bourdain.Book Review: Mildly entertaining.
Summary: 3 Stars
The best parts of the book are the semi-autobiographical elements which are probably lifted from the author's career as a chef. The convuluted plot includes dealings with the mafia, and ends pretty unsatisfactorily.Where the author excels is entertaining the reader with tales about the sex, drugs, and criminal behavior, and he's only talking about the restaurant staff. He let's us in on the secrets behind how food is delivered to your table at dinner time.
For a better look behind the restaurant business, I recommend reading his non-fiction works Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour.
Book Review: Oh Tony, I'm starting to have a crush
Summary: 5 Stars
I have read you kitchen confidential, a cook's tour, and gone bamboo. Let me tell you, the first two were excellent. This one and gone bamboo were so simply written. You can tell he is definatly not an author per say, but he is so much fun you can't put it down. His writing needs some help. But who cares!! I love him. Please marry me.Book Review: Raw meat.
Summary: 4 Stars
Set in the Bronx and Brooklyn, this is a grisly and graphic story of mob murder, dismemberment, and torture, along with the businesses of protection, loansharking, and money laundering. Tommy Pagano, the sous-chef at a small restaurant, who was cared for as a child by his mob-connected uncle Sal Pitera, finds himself up to his prime rib in dangerous mob business when Sally wants payback. Sandwiched between bloodthirsty racketeers on one side and equally threatening and sinister investigators who want him to give up Sally and his "friends" on the other side, Tommy has more than ample reason to fear for his life.
Suspense and horror are leavened throughout by humor, which comes mainly from absurdities--a hitman standing naked while he dismembers a body in order to protect his clothes, a chef upset because someone used his kitchen knife instead of a boning knife, a mobster telling a hitman that his actions were "bush." This is primarily is a fast-paced story of murder and mayhem, with humor on the side and lots of insights into the restaurant business. Local color, realistic-sounding (and often funny) wise-guy dialogue, an engaging main character with whom we sympathize, and investigators who are sometimes as venal as the men they investigate will keep you reading well into the night. Mary Whipple
Book Review: That's tony...
Summary: 5 Stars
A NY chef for 30+ years his favorite books are crime dramas like "the friends of eddie coyle". This is his version of a crime drama but instead of writing from a legal or law enforcement perspective he writes what he knows about. The not so glamorous underbelly of the restaurant world. The focus of the story is tommy an Italian American sous chef who is serious about haute French cuisine. He develops a close friendship with his coked out chef who he admires for his knowledge and skill in the kitchen. The problem with tommy is that his sleezy mafia uncle gets him in deep and he never knows that the restaurant he works in is a set up for the feds to put guys like his uncle away.
Like any good crime drama it is gritty and rough. You find yourself feeling for tommy and his, predictament and despising the brutal mobsters. Bourdain might have spent almost all of his adult life in the kitchen but he doesn't back off at all in depicting violence. It won't take you long to read this book because once you start it is hard to stop a real page turner.
I believe bourdain's personality exists in both the tommy and the chef characters. The chef like tony is part French and has a drug problem something that tony admitted he once had in "Kitchen Confidental". But the tommy character is a punk rock loving kid who maybe resembles tony in his earlier days. Certainly there are some autobiographical moments here and the restaurant name is the same as the first restaurant tony worked at in provincetown. The dreadnaught..