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| Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table | 
 enlarge | Author: Ruth Reichl
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $15.94 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  110 reviews
Sales Rank: 20343
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0767903382
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5092
EAN: 9780767903387
ASIN: 0767903382
Publication Date: March 2, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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| Customer Reviews:
 I'm Hungry for More! March 11, 2008
I loved reading Tender at the Bone. I felt like I had found a new girlfriend and I was 19 again and wanted her to be my roommate. We had so much in common! I also had grown up in Connecticut. My father was superintendent of schools in Norwalk while she lived in Wilton. Of course Ruth lived in New York City also, and traveled and did tons of things as a child and a young woman that I didn't do. But still I always had this feeling as I read this book that I was with a new best friend. I loved all the intimate thoughts, feelings and disclosures that she shared. I never laughed so hard in all my life, reading a book, as I did reading about the engagement party for her brother, when her mother almost killed off the guests with spoiled food. I hope the story was a bit of an exaggeration! How well I knew Norwalk Hospital, where the poisoned guests went! That's where I had my appendix out at 13 and my mom had a baby when I was seventeen! The book couldn't be long enough for me. I enjoyed her travels, except for her time in school in Canada when I felt so badly for her. I was so relieved when that experience was over. I have to say that I really savored the whole book. Many people have read Tender at the Bone because of me!
If you want a fabulous read, if you want to feel intimate with a stranger, if you want to taste good food without the calories, if you want to travel and learn a new profession without leaving your chair, if you want to have a new best friend, then join me and read Tender at the Bone! The Truth: I'm a Girl, I'm Smart and I Know Everything
Sweet, Funny, Light-Hearted Memoir December 21, 2007
Ruth Reichl has been a food editor and restaurant critic for the LA Times and NY Times and is now the editor of Gourmet Magazine, but if you're thinking that Tender at the Bone is just another foodie book, think again. Sure, it has recipes (18 of them, most simple, all tantalizing) and plenty of mouth-watering descriptions of food, cookery, and dining. It's also a tasty, tantalizing book, a smorgasbord of entertaining character sketches and often hilarious food adventures.
But Tender at the Bone has its serious side. It tells the disturbing tale of a family thrown into chaos by Ruth's manic mother, the "Queen of Mold" whose idea of a gourmet meal is a stewed two-week-old turkey carcass. It is an almost-classic rite-of-passage journey of a lonely young girl whose dysfunctional parents abandon her to the care of others, leaving her to discover that good food can comfort the lonely (Alice's Apple Dumplings), that food can seduce the unwary (Devil's Food Cake), and that food always expresses our deepest cultural and familial longings (Serafina's mother's Coconut Bread). As she meets helpers who encourage her to outgrow her controlling mother, Ruth graduates from waitress to commune cook to restaurant chef to food writer, stumbling into her vocation along the way in this wonderful journey of self-discovery. Food is a "way of making sense of the world," Ruth says in an introspective moment, or as another character succinctly remarks, "I have to keep tasting."
Tender at the Bone is a sweet, funny, light-hearted memoir whose lessons are dished out with a deft hand. At the same time it is a revealing self-study that offers insights into the forces that limited Reichl during her childhood and teen years, as well as those that brought her new experiences. The author's insatiable appetite for life, her compelling need to "keep tasting": to savor adventure, sample many lifestyles, delight in diversity, relish discovery, learn, create, and grow. It is a nourishing book, in all its various dimensions.
by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
reviewing books by, for, and about women
 An enjoyable account of food-filled events. November 6, 2007
This is the true story of how an influential food critic came to know food. It chronicles the stories and people from her life that shaped her relationship with food and how food has shaped her relationship with people.
I was worried as the book began that it would be filled with nothing more than anecdotes about her mother's culinary disasters...as that is how the book begins. I thought that if the book continued on like that I would give up well before it was over. And I was worried over nothing.
Rather than reading about a young girl who learned to fear her mother's creativity in the kitchen (even though that happened), Tender at the Bone touches on how food became an integral part of each stage of Ruth Reichl's life. Through food she found friends, made friends, and kept friends. With food she learned to create and express herself to her own delight and to the delight of others. She learned the ins and outs of the restaurant business and experienced first hand how important food is to other cultures.
It is fascinating to read her tale, especially to see the luck she has had. While her life took her the wrong way down many one-way streets, she always managed to come across someone who could teach her or show her something invaluable. (I do not mean to discredit her achievements by mentioning her good fortune since not everyone would have been as astute as she was to learn from everything that happened.)
From the stories of her childhood it seemed unlikely that she would end up in the position she has today. She has lived an interesting life which has taken her to many different countries and many different cultures. This book takes you by the hand and leads you through all of it.
 Sometimes you just get a craving, I guess. November 1, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ruth Reichl, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (Broadway, 1998)
There's something to be said for the idea that perhaps one needs to be in the mood to read certain books. I started Tender at the Bone back in the summer of 2006, made it through two chapters, and almost gave up on it entirely. While I'm not a fan of memoirs in general, I am a very big fan of food, and so this seemed like a good match for me. At the time, however, I had just finished reading a couple of mediocre-to-awful memoirs, and this was the straw that broke the camel's back, I guess. But I came back to it in October of 2007, picked up where I left off, and finished the rest of the book in three days. Go figure.
Tender at the Bone is Reichl's account of her early life, the formative events that drew her into being a food writer. I can't tell whether my problems with the first few chapters had to do with pace or whether I just wasn't in the mood for it when I first tried them, but the rest of the book moves along at a pretty good clip, alternately amusing and horrifying, with a recipe per chapter for some similarly alternately amusing and horrifying stuff. If you like memoirs, and if you like food, this really is a good fit for you. I know some of us are pretty sick of the whole memoir fad, but who doesn't like food? ***
love this author October 11, 2007
I love this author. She writes about life and food in such a way that you want to run out and learn to do the same. You want to try each recipe in the books and head to frence and learn french. Great read. Cannot wait to read the next.
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