Product Description

Julia Child became a household name when she entered the lives of millions of Americans through our hearts and kitchens. Yet few know the richly varied private life that lies behind this icon, whose statuesque height and warmly enthused warble have become synonymous with the art of cooking.

In this biography we meet the earthy and outrageous Julia, who, at age eighty-five, remains a complex role model. Fitch, who had access to all of Julia's private letters and diaries, takes us through her life, from her exuberant youth as a high-spirited California girl to her years at Smith College, where she was at the center of every prank and party. When most of her girlfriends married, Julia volunteered with the OSS in India and China during World War II, and was an integral part of this elite corps. There she met her future husband, the cosmopolitan Paul Child, who introduced her to the glories of art, fine French cuisine, and love. Theirs was a deeply passionate romance and a modern marriage of equals.

Julia began her culinary training only at the age of thirty-seven at the Cordon Bleu. Later she roamed the food markets of Marseilles, Bonn, and Oslo. She invested ten years of learning and experimentation in what would become her first bestselling classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Now, her career is legend, spanning nearly forty years and still going strong. Generations love the humor and trademark aplomb that have made Julia a household name. Resisting fads and narrow, fanatical conventions of health-consciousness, Julia is the quintessential teacher. The perfect gift for food lovers and a romantic biography of a woman modern before her time, this is a truly American life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #903 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-04
• Released on: 1999-04-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385493833
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Noel Riley Fitch's savory new biography, Appetite for Life, reveals a woman as appealing as the good food and serious cooking she popularized. As a California girl and Smith College undergraduate, Fitch writes, Julia McWilliams was notable for her high spirits and voracious appetite. Performing intelligence work in Asia during World War II, she met Paul Child, and their marriage of mutual devotion and affection endured until his death in 1994. His postwar assignment took them to France, where she discovered her true calling.

Fitch reminds us that Child championed fresh ingredients at a time when frozen foods and TV dinners dominated American supermarket shelves, and that she demystified haute cuisine with her earthy humor and casual attitude toward mistakes. This affectionate portrait of the remarkable Julia Child reflects her fervent belief that the pleasures of the table are a natural accompaniment to the pleasures of life.

From Booklist
No one person in the U.S. improved the nation's standard of eating more than Julia Child. Her celebrity stems less from her masterwork, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, than from her perennially popular PBS television series, The French Chef. Born into a wealthy Southern California home, Julia McWilliams led a lively but pampered existence until she met Paul Child in wartime India. These two eager esthetes, for whom the worst possible sin was being boring, bonded into an extraordinarily strong marriage that helped the husband survive McCarthy's purges and gave the wife a decade to focus on her revolutionary book. Although the Childs crossed paths with dozens of political, artistic, and literary notables in postwar Paris, Marseille, Bonn, Oslo, and Washington, biographer Fitch does little but catalog names. But he does make both Childs' personalities come alive, from Paul's meticulousness to Julia's exuberant, even bawdy, gusto. Uneasy yet productive relationships among Julia and her coauthors fed off both professional and cultural differences. Fitch recounts in mortifying detail one of publishing's great gaffes: Houghton Mifflin let Mastering slip away to Knopf. Julia's evolution from author into television personality and food guru began in her fifties; now in her eighties, she continues to reshape the food world she transfigured. Mark Knoblauch

From Kirkus Reviews
Riley (Ana‹s: The Erotic Life of Ana‹s Nin, 1993, etc.) offers a loving, overstuffed biography of the cook from Pasadena who introduced French cooking to the American kitchen. Julia McWilliams, a leggy California girl, was an adventurous child with a huge appetite who rarely strayed into the kitchen. Equally adventurous as a young woman, and bored with her career in advertising, she joined the OSS. In 1944, while in Asia, she met the dashing Paul Child, an OSS officer and artist with a love of women, food, and poetry. After a rocky start, the two fell passionately in love. Paul introduced Julia to the pleasures of the table, and she became fascinated with food and its preparation. When Paul's new role as an American cultural attach‚ took them to Paris after the war, Julia began cooking in earnest, even attending the famed Cordon Bleu school, where she wedded her American enthusiasm and sense of fun to the serious world of the gourmand. In Paris she met her lifelong collaborator, Simone (``Simca'') Beck. The two set out to create a cookbook. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, proved to be an immediate success. American cooks used it to escape the tyranny of frozen foods and grew to appreciate Childs's reliance on good food, not food snobbery. With her husband watching proudly from the wings, she went on to do television shows. Audiences loved her quick wit, her vibrant voice, and her slightly awkward presence in the kitchen--she was famous for getting splattered. While Riley's book is short on recipes, her details are exquisite: Julia and Paul's defense of a friend accused of communism in 1955, despite the threat to Paul's career; Julia telling her lonely sister to ``get a diaphragm and move to Paris to complete your education''; and Paul's gorgeous love letters to Julia. An exhaustively researched, charming story of a life well lived, and an admiring portrait of a good marriage. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Not For Cooks Only!
Julia Child as a personality has long been melded with Julia Child, the cook. I watched her shows in the sixties as a child having little interest in the kitchen, but simply finding her fascinating to watch! 'The French Chef', unlike the Galloping Gourmet and others, has aged well and can still be watched with enjoyment. Why? Because Julia Child was always herself on TV, never pandering to the transient and fickle tastes of the times.

Watching Julia's various series, I learned some about her life, but eagerly purchased this book when it first appeared. Unlike some other reviewers, I delighted in this auther's literary painting of the times in which Julia has lived. To me, nothing is more disappointing in a biography than the feeling that something has been left out!

This book demonstrates that though her name to the public has been made by her cooking career, Julia Child is much, much more. For those who enjoy reading biographies, this will provide enjoyment regardless of whether they like cooking or not!

Not a masterful biography.
As a great American icon, Julia Child deserves a great biography, but if this book is any indication, she may have to write her own. Although the book provides a lot of interesting detail, the author often fails to thread them into any cohesive fashion, and page after page is factoid upon factoid with no apparent organizing principle. Also far too much time is spent tediously detailing the guest lists for dozens of Child dinner parties, making much of the book sound like one of those dreadful society columns filled with the names of party goers and their various social and educational connections. This is what happens when an author, working off of the papers of her subject, is unable to rise above the reportage level to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I'll give the author credit for doing a lot of research and providing an intimate glimpse at the Child marriage and the interesting figure of Paul Child himself. It also does a good job of taking us through the painstaking 9-year process of writing and rewriting "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". But as for a well-organized transcendant portrait of Julia herself, this one is missing the touch of a master.

Rich, romantic bio of a great woman of our century.
My husband and I listened to this book on tape (Blackstone Audio). We both loved it, and couldn't wait to get home each evening to hear the next tape in the 16-tape series. Neither of us knew much about Julia Child previously, and we are both very grateful to have 'Appetite for Life' open our eyes to a truly inspirational American. Julia can look for us in one of those long, long lines of adoring fans at her next book signing.