Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
by Kathleen Flinn
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2007
304 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
In 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 love along the way. Flinn interweaves more than two dozen recipes with a unique look inside Le Cordon Bleu amid battles with demanding chefs, competitive classmates, and her “wretchedly inadequate” French. Flinn offers a vibrant portrait of Paris, one in which the sights and sounds of the city’s street markets and purveyors come alive in rich detail. The ultimate wish fulfillment book, her story is a true testament to pursuing a dream.
"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." - Publishers Weekly.
A fascinating look inside a famed elite institution, unnecessarily garnished with lackluster autobiography." - Kirkus Reviews.
"I can never get enough of true stories about people who stop in the middle of their life's journey to ask, 'What do I really want?' and then have the guts to actually go get it. Kathleen Flinn's tale of chasing her ultimate dream makes for a really lovely book-engaging, intelligent and surprisingly suspenseful." - "Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.
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