Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child - Bob Spitz

Its rare for someone to emerge in America who can change our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture. Its even rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV station. And yet, thats exactly what Julia Child did. The warble-voiced doyenne of television cookery became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule-breaker as she touched off the food revolution that has gripped America for more than fifty years. Now, in Bob Spitzs definitive, wonderfully affectionate biography, the Julia we know and love comes vividly and surprisingly to life. In Dearie, Spitz employs the same skill he brought to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book The Beatles, providing a clear-eyed portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential Americans of our time a woman known to all, yet known by only a few.At its heart, Dearie is a story about a womans search for her own unique expression. Julia Child was a directionless, gawky young woman who ran off halfway around the world to join a spy agency during World War II. She eventually settled in Paris, where she learned to cook and collaborated on the writing of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book that changed the food culture of America. She was already fifty when The French Chef went on the air at a time in our history when women werent making those leaps. Julia became the first educational TV star, virtually launching PBS as we know it today; her marriage to Paul Child formed a decades-long love story that was romantic, touching, and quite extraordinary. A fearless, ambitious, supremely confident woman, Julia took on all the pretensions that embellished tony French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for everything that has happened since in American cooking, from TV dinners and Big Macs to sea urchin foam and the Food Channel. Julia Childs story, however, is more than the tale of a talented woman and her sumptuous craft. It is also a saga of Americas coming of age and growing sophistication, from the Depression Era to the turbulent sixties and the excesses of the eighties to the greening of the American kitchen. Julia had an effect on and was equally affected by the baby boom, the sexual revolution, and the start of the womens liberation movement. On the centenary of her birth, Julia finally gets the biography she richly deserves. An in-depth, intimate narrative, full of fresh information and insights, Dearie is an entertaining, all-out adventure story of one of our most fascinating and beloved figures.From the Hardcover edition.

Published: 2012-08-21 (Random House Large Print)

ISBN: 9780307990839

Language: English

Format: Paperback, 1008 pages

Goodreads' rating: -

Genres

Biography History Nonfiction Food Biography Memoir Food and Drink

Reviews

Susi rated it

I might have been impressed by this book if I hadn't already read Noel Riley Fitch's Appetite For Life last summer and Julia Child's own My Life In France several years before that. But I have. So I wasn't.There is little new material here.Aside from an occasional nugget or two, everything here was covered in those books. Spitz spends a good deal of time imposing his own view of Julia upon her behavior, commenting on social history and slanging American home cooking--and as a home cook myself, there are other choices between can/frozen food cooking and Julia's masterpieces when it comes to everyday dinners!Spitz also attempts to be hip, describing a young Julia in college as getting "shit faced" drunk and other such phrases that are more Julie Powell than Julia Child. His frequent comments about her "saucy" sense of humor come off as more cutsey than anything else. And how about the infamous valentines she and Paul used to make and send their friends? Far more telling than most of the incidents he brings up, and he only mentions that in passing.This is getting good publicity, but if you want better, truer portraits of our Julia, read the other books and give this one a pass.

José Manuel rated it

Dearie tells the story of Julia Child, one of my heroes. She was a late bloomer, who, a decade after graduating from Smith (and barely at that) still didn't know what the heck to do with her life. By the time she died in 2004, two days shy of her 92nd birthday, she was an American icon. Her kitchen can be seen in the Smithsonian, and on this web link http://amhistory.si.edu/juliachild/Biographies are perhaps my favorites reads. I am always interested in reading about the childhood of intriguing people, wondering what it was that motivated them, or what circumstances of timing and opportunity shaped who they became. By all accounts Julia was destined to be the stuffy conservative socialite wife of some wealthy entrepreneur or old school moneyed family. If, that is, she survived the hi-jinks of her childhood and college years. She was a party animal who eventually looked for more.When WWII came, she entered the OSS, having been turned down by the WAVEs and the WACs because at 6'2" (or maybe 6'3" depending on who you asked) she was too tall. She worked during WWII in India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and China. Rather than be a bored diplomat's wife after she finally married her OSS cohort, Paul Child, she went to Le Cordon Bleu, published a book at age 49, and at age 51 became a television sensation. I remember...I watched her. She demystified cooking. She was funny, the down-to-earth woman who encouraged you to be brave and have fun with the food. She let us eat butter, and cream, and good red wine. Thank you Julia Child, and thank you Bob Spitz for this wonderfully rich biography that lets us learn more about this pioneering woman who paved the way for every cooking and food show out there today. Bob Spitz captured her free spirited, opinionated, humorous outlook on life, without skimping on the difficult parts she endured. The book is long, but well worth the read.

Rowe rated it

A good biography doesn't read like a biography. It doesn't speak directly about the person (the subject) and start sentence after sentence with "she _______" or make blatant statements about their character like "Julia was a non-conformist." It also doesn't speak with a pre-determined tone of what we know or expect the person to be- merely confirming and reinforcing the general opinion or knowledge about the person. These are all of the reasons why this is not an interesting or well written biography.Try instead a gradual and intimate unfolding of detail and story in Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noël Riley Fitch. It reads like good history books, drawing you closer to the subject, illuminating aspects of their world with context and depth. A good biographer is a intimate storyteller surrounding a person's life- without directly "telling" about the person. We are what happens to us and what we do in the eyes of others, and capturing that is the goal of biography/memoir.