Solace at the table

Paula Butturini, who will be speaking about her new memoir Wednesday evening at the Library, got a powerful rave in the New York Times Book Review this morning. Reviewer Mika Brzezinski says “ ‘Keeping the Feast’ shares with  Julie Powell’s ‘Julie & Julia’ and Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’  the insight that food can jump-start a journey toward solace.”

As Brzezinski summarizes it, “The joy of cooking was certainly the salve that soothed the emotional wounds that the journalist  Paula Butturini endured as she and her husband [John Tagliabue of the New York Times] suffered bullets, police beatings and a battle with depression that almost tore their marriage apart. Butturini tells her story through the lens of food — its restorative powers and its capacity to trigger the brain to remember and hope in times of tragedy and challenge.”