Noel Riley Fitch - Appetite For Life [Kindle azw3]

No one person in the U.S. improved the nation's standard of eating more than Julia Child. Her celebrity stems less from her masterwork, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, than from her perennially popular PBS television series, The French Chef. Born into a wealthy Southern California home, Julia McWilliams led a lively but pampered existence until she met Paul Child in wartime India. These two eager esthetes, for whom the worst possible sin was being boring, bonded into an extraordinarily strong marriage that helped the husband survive McCarthy's purges and gave the wife a decade to focus on her revolutionary book. Although the Childs crossed paths with dozens of political, artistic, and literary notables in postwar Paris, Marseille, Bonn, Oslo, and Washington, biographer Fitch does little but catalog names. But he does make both Childs' personalities come alive, from Paul's meticulousness to Julia's exuberant, even bawdy, gusto. Uneasy yet productive relationships among Julia and her coauthors fed off both professional and cultural differences. Fitch recounts in mortifying detail one of publishing's great gaffes: Houghton Mifflin let Mastering slip away to Knopf. Julia's evolution from author into television personality and food guru began in her fifties; now in her eighties, she continues to reshape the food world she transfigured.