Don't Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs

[MattFin]

This book was a collection of anecdotes from some of the world's great chefs about the experiences that only professional chefs could encounter. While some of the stories were truly excellent - like realizing that almost 1,000 pounds of lobster had gone bad just before a dinner, or a meal so poorly planned that people were waiting 4 hours for their food - some of the other stories were just annoying preening and completely self-congratulatory.

But that's what you get when you have a collection of stories written by people with different writing skills.

However, that brings me to the other complaint I had with this book. The editing job done by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman were so overdone that every story sounded like they were written by the same person. Sure,the content was different, and thus the stories varied in how interesting they were as a result, but the "voice" that told each story was almost identical. (Anthony Bourdain of course being a noted exception...). Again though, this is perhaps what needs to be done when people of varying writing talents are tasked with writing stories for a book.

All in all, this is a book that is a good read for a professional chef. It certainly got my heart racing at times since I know how rough situations like these can be. And all I hope is that I never find myself in any of these situations when I am on the line.

[KYHeirloomer]

>Again though, this is perhaps what needs to be done when people of varying writing talents are tasked with writing stories for a book.<

Actually, Mat, your comments leading up to this were more on target.

What this is is a sign of poor editing. And, unfortunately, there's a lot of that going on in the cookery book world.

I don't know how some of these editors (and, worse, ghos...I'm sorry, co-authors) get their jobs. But it's certainly not through any skill in the use of language.