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Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
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When the author, an American journalist and software executive working in London, is sacked from her high-powered job, she enrolls as a student at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris. With limited cooking skills and grasp of the French language, she gamely attempts to master the school's challenging curriculum of traditional French cuisine. As if she didn't have enough on her plate eviscerating fish and knocking out pâtéà choux, she determines to write a book about her experience and gets married along the way. The result is a readable if sentimental chronicle of that year in Paris in which her love life is explored in great detail, dirty weekends and all, and cooking features as a metaphor for self-discovery. Some readers may feel disappointed that the narrator's encounters with French cookery remain largely confined to her lessons at the Cordon Bleu. On those rare occasions when she ventures into the food-obsessed city, the descriptions of meals are glancing at best. Although her struggles with the language and lack of knowledge about the culture lend comic elements to the story (once, trying to order a pizza over the phone, she said, "Je suis une pizza"-I am a pizza), they, too, constrain the author's culinary explorations. (Oct.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Kathleen Flinn has been a writer and journalist for nearly twenty years. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and many other publications.
This book was a lot of fun to read! I found this one while browsing the foodie section of my local library. The dust jacket description hooked me and I borrowed it. The true story of one womans experience at the worlds most famous culinary school in Paris.
Kathleen Flinn decides to attend culinary school in Paris, a life-long dream, after being laid off from her overseas job in London. The author takes us along on her true life journey at Le Cordon Bleu school in Paris. He story is light hearted, funny and inspriing. Each chapter is capped off with wonderful recipies of varing degrees each related to the chapter they finish.
Such a wonder fulss story to read. I blew threw this book in no time. So good that I purchased a copy for my wife to read also. Not to mention to have a copy around the house for the recipies since I had borrowed it from the library anyway.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 20, 2010
Her personal story is a little slow, but I really enjoy cooking & want to go to this school so I enjoyed it inspite of that. It also contains recipes at the end of the chapters so I LOVE that.
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Overview
A delightful true story of food, Paris, and the fulfillment of a lifelong dreamIn 2003, Kathleen Flinn, a thirty-six-year-old American living and working in London, returned from vacation to find that her corporate job had been eliminated. Ignoring her mother's advice that she get another job immediately or "never get hired anywhere ever again," Flinn instead cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream-a diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry is the touching and remarkably funny account of Flinn's transformation as she moves through the school's intense program and falls deeply in...