A light, entertaining story of how a man turned his pipe dream into a profitable, highly respected business.
How the author created the ultimate American diner experience in Paris.
Carlson’s love of all things French began when he was required to take a foreign language in high school. Learning French changed his perspective on the world, and it was only natural to choose France as his destination for his collegiate study-abroad program. When his year overseas was up, he returned to America to continue pursuing his screenwriting career. But it was while eating an American breakfast complete with buckwheat pancakes that Carlson had an epiphany that changed his life. He realized the food he was eating wasn’t available in Paris. “Suddenly, I could see everything so clearly….I realized all those twists and turns, all those ups and downs....They really had happened for a reason. And at that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do—no, had to do next: open an American diner in Paris! I even knew what I was going to call it—Breakfast in America.” With nonstop enthusiasm, the author details the many obstacles he faced to make his dream a reality. He needed to secure money from investors, create a viable business plan, find a good location, hire employees, create a menu, and find sources for American foods, all while on French soil and following French rules, which turned out to be vastly different from those in the United States. Despite all these setbacks, the exhaustion that comes from working almost every minute, and the difficulty convincing Parisians that American food and coffee are actually tasty, Carlson’s desire to bring American diner food to Paris paid off (there are now three locations). The author demonstrates that no idea is too crazy if one has the determination to pursue it to its fruition.
A light, entertaining story of how a man turned his pipe dream into a profitable, highly respected business.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3212-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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