Book Review

"Comfort Me With Apples" by Ruth Reichl (Century £12.99stg.)

Ruth Reichl is editor-in-chief at Gourmet Magazine, and has been restaurant critic for both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. "Comfort Me With Apples" is her second volume of autobiography, following on from "Tender at the Bone".

It is a fascinating book, fascinating in the same way that, say, a train crash, or a wobbly-walking high-heeled transvestite, might command and demand our attention. You read this diabolically written tome - and the prose is purest dreck - and think to yourself: "Surely this is a need-to-know situation, and I don't need to know this".

The book charts Ruth's determination to become a food writer after working as a chef, and her success in achieving her goal. We meet the people in her life at her various jobs, and she tells us all about her personal life. The book exhibits the towering intellectual command of Marian Keyes coupled with the incise verbal acuity of Cathy Kelly. You wade through this wanderland of self-regard on the point of tears; not tears of laughter at the author's attempts at humour, or tears of sympathy for the reverses she encounters in her life, but tears for the poor, unfortunate, innocent trees that had to die to see this travesty brought into being. "Comfort Me With Apples"? "Pelt It With Tomatoes" is more like it.

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