A Pulitzer Prize finalist peels back the curtain on an unexplored part of Julia Child's life—the formidable team of six she collaborated with to shape her legendary career.
Julia Child's monumental Mastering the Art of French Cooking and iconic television show The French Chef required a team of innovators to bring out her unique presence and personality. Warming Up Julia Child is a behind-the-scenes look at this supporting team, revealing how the savvy of these helpers, collaborators, and supporters contributed to Julia's overwhelming success. In today’s parlance, they were her posse, her entourage.
Julia is the central subject, but Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has her share the stage with those who aided her work. She reveals that the most important element in Julia Child’s ultimate success was her unusual capacity for forming fruitful alliances, whether it was Paul Child, Simone Beck, Avis DeVoto, Judith Jones and William Koshland (at Knopf), and Ruth Lockwood (at WGBH). Without the contribution of these six collaborators Julia could never have accomplished what she did.
Filled with vivid correspondence, fascinating characters, and the iconic joie de vivre that makes us come back to Julia again and again, Warming Up Julia Child is essential reading for anyone who adores Julia and her legacy.
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“Follows Child’s ten-year path to fame, all of which is recounted in Richardson’s bright voice…Listeners learn, via Richardson’s steady performance, about this remarkable chef who conquered French food, brought the complex cuisine to reading and TV-watching audiences, and became a household name.”
— AudioFile
“Intimate insights into how Julia developed a network of talented, nurturing colleagues who helped transform her into a highly revered cultural icon.”
— Bookist (starred review)“Does justice to all six of Julia’s warriors and elucidates their connections by supplying excerpts from their written correspondence…Warming Up Julia Child is, like its subject, a charmer.”
— Shelf Awareness“Juxtaposes Child’s struggles with self-doubt…with intimate exchanges of encouragement between the chef and her most trusted aides, as well as colorful accounts of Child’s achievements as recorded in her husband’s daily diary.”
— Publishers WeeklyBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor of American History and American Studies, emerita, Smith College, is a historian whose work has focused on the cultural history of the US and on culturally important biographical subjects. Honors include the 2003 citation for her book Rereading Sex as one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Merle Curti Award given by the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American social or intellectual history. In 2011 she, in conjunction with Patricia Hills, won the W. E. Fischelis Book Award of the Victorian Society of America for John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women.
Ann Richardson is an Earphones-winning narrator who studied broadcast journalism and Spanish at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Years later, the desire to take up a creative yet productive career lead her to narrating audiobooks and founding Great Plains Audiobooks, an audiobook publishing company focusing on bringing Midwestern literature to audio.