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Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball
Books: CookBooks: Food and Wine Magazine: Item 4
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Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseballby Molly O'Neill
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It's good to have Molly back, July 20, 2006 Reviewer:Edward Damato (Brooklyn, NY United States) - I loved Molly O'Neill's food columns in the New York Times and still miss them. She's an excellent food writer and with her memoir, Mostly True, she proves to be an excellent writer. Putting Mostly True in the same category as Angela's Ashes is saying a lot but that's where I place it. I loved everything about this book be it from her wanting a baby sister, to cooking in Provincetown with her two brothers, to her sharing her brother Paul's last night in pinstripes. She's leading an eventful life and has a great career. Imagine having Julia Child over for dinner and then having Paul O'Neill as a brother? I wish Molly were my friend. It's a great read and highly recommended.
From Publishers Weekly
Former columnist for the New York Times and author of The New York Cookbook, O'Neill de-emphasizes the cooking element here in favor of cozy family gatherings around baseball games. Her memoir begins even before the courtship of her parents, minor leaguer "Chick" O'Neill and six-foot, convent-educated "Bootsie" Gwinn, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1945, and extends to younger brother Paul O'Neill's retirement as right-fielder for the Yankees in 2001. O'Neill meanders lovingly through years growing up as the eldest to five brothers who channeled their adolescent hormones into Little League. O'Neill records her first forays into cooking inspired by an Ohio Power and Electric Co. demonstration given for her Brownie troop; her brothers worshipped her for making dishes from Spam and processed cheese. In college, she secured jobs as a cook and took over the kitchen at Ciro's in Boston by 1979. Her cooking segued into writing, first for the Globe, then New York Newsday. By the time she became a restaurant critic for the Times in the early 1990s, younger brother Paul had been traded to the Yankees, bringing the whole unwieldy family to feast in New York. O'Neill charts a long-winded, pleasantly nostalgic trip. B&w photos. (May)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Former New York Yankee outfielder Paul O'Neill's big sister is definitely a writer: this reads like shards of family stories, each one burnished to a deep shine of memory and longing. It's not a family bio, exactly; although she writes of her parents and five younger brothers, each looms large and fades. She writes about being female and tall in her childhood home in Ohio; about what made her parents who they were; about each of the boys, especially golden-haired baby Paulie. She writes, with offhand elegance and bone-deep humor, about the food of the Midwest, her mother's food, and the food she learned to cook later, in Provincetown and in Paris. Although it starts rather dreamily and slowly, the book's final chapters, chronicling more recent times--with her as the food writer for the New York Times and Paul as the baseball warrior for the New York Yankees--are like listening to a friend you want to know better reminisce about her incredibly engaging and engaged life. Anyone interested in any of the words of the subtitle will find much to enjoy. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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