Customer Reviews

Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I love reading about women and how they juggle career, family, and personal time, and was looking forward to doing so in a humorous light by reading Food and Whine. I just found the book to be too cute and too self-conscious to be realistic. By the end, I felt like I had spent a long time on a family trip with the Moses clan, and wanted out of the minivan!

This was a wonderful book -- a warm, touching and funny account of a very difficult year in a family's life. Moses tells her story with unrelenting honesty, from her competitive feelings toward her Harvard-law-school grad siblings, to her guilty self-centered thoughts during her mother's struggle with cancer. I look forward to her next book!

I love books that make me laugh out loud! This book brought to light many of the issues women who stay home with their children face. I loved Moses realism and frank descriptions. It was a light, fun read and I'm glad I stumbled upon it.

Jennifer Moses' book is full of her insightful observations of life's contradictions...laughter, joy, sorrow, triumphs and tribulations. Written in a prose which induced honest to goodness belly laughs from this particular reader,she tells it like it is with humor and love. Insightful, hilarious, and poignant...a joy to read.

This is a very funny book. It has the credibility, the ring of truth, without which slapstick, caricature, and wit are lifeless. It's like reading Dave Barry as an American, "Lucky Jim" as an academic, or Oscar Wilde as a ... never mind. Just read it.

While the cover copy on this book makes it sound intriguing and funny, it really was a lot of whining and kvetching. I have two small children and if I wanted to read about someone else raising kids without humor, I'd definitely read this again.

This book is hilarious and a real page-turner. I read it in one sitting, give or take a few food breaks--which is part of the author's point: that the texture of daily life involves a whole lot of mind-numbing, repetitive food preparation when you are dedicated to nurturing husband and children. At first you think you are reading an off-kilter and off-the-cuff cookbook/self-help book. But as you continue, the narrative, which is casually interspersed with "girlfriend"-type advice, gains power and intimacy, and detail upon detail of everyday suburban domestic life finally coelesces into a touching memoir that is as ridiculous as it is wise. (And even though it doesn't, finally, turn out to be a cookbook, I actually made some of the recipes and they were great!)

I wanted to like this book; I really did. The author was witty and the recipes she mentioned sounded yummy and easy to prepare. But if she were my next-door neighbor, I'd constantly be finding excuses not to talk with her. Her excessive whining and inexcusible self-centeredness in the face of family tragedy overshadowed everything else and left me completely disgusted with her. To sum up: this looked like a fun book to take on a long flight; instead, I left it in the airport ladies' room.

I read Food and Whine in two sittings, and would have done so in one, except I had to go to work. This book is so funny that I actually got a stomach ache laughing. But it's not, as the flap copy contends, some kind of updated Erma Bombeck. It's more like a memoir than like a series of stand-up takes on various mommy-related subjects. Also, the author grapples seriously with serious things, like her mother's cancer. In general, I found it to be a incredibly honest and refreshingly real account of motherhood -- and unlike most other books on this subject that I've read over the years, there's nothing gloppy or sentimental or trite about it. It's the author's disarming honesty, and ability to laugh at herself, that makes this book such a joy to read.

I truly loved this book. I'm at a loss to understand some of the absolutely scathing, negative reviews from some of the other readers. Here is a stay-at-home mom, dealing with a young child and a set of twins, while at the same time dealing with her mother's diagnosis of cancer and that the fact that she (the author) never wanted to grow up and be a "domestic goddess" but rather, a painter, a writer, a skinny person in black, living in a garrett in France. I've been there and so have many of my friends. The stories she relates about the jewish holidays are right on track, as are the stories about different relatives.

Jennifer Moses is funny. I wish she were a neighbor of mine!