Bourdain appears to have had a decent enough childhood and his chapter about discovering good food in France was nice. We all eat in restaurants, but we very rarely think about what goes on beyond the kitchen doors (until our steak is undercooked, then we are all opinion). It tasted of seawater… of brine and flesh… and somehow… of the future… I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit and everything that followed in my life – the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation – would all stem from this moment. I find a lot of the typical behaviour of groups of women tedious and irritating and try to stay away from it as much as I can.

With my little short-shorts a permanent affront, I was quickly becoming a sullen, moody, difficult little bastard.So then the guy gives him a weird look, and the interview ends with Bourdain knowing he's not getting the job. Bourdain promises to take you behind the scenes of the restaurant industry, which he certainly does - it's just that he only takes you to very specific restaurant environments that he has worked in and has directly helped shape, a revelation that he only gets to almost three-quarters of the way through the book. It was the advent of celebrity chefs and everything that industry has brought to food and restaurants. After a few weeks of this, we took a night train to Paris, where we met up with my father and a spanking new Rover Sedan Mark III, our touring car. Bourdain is the author of the New York Times bestselling Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw; A Cook’s Tour; the collection The Nasty Bits; the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo; the biography Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical; two graphic novels, Get Jiro!

Very light bumping to spine ends, internally fresh; minor rubbing and creasing to jacket extremities, unclipped: a near-fine copy in like jacket. I'm not sure why I picked this up, I guess because I heard Bourdain was the "punk rock chef," but besides listening to the Sex Pistols and Velvet Underground while he cooked, there's not a whole lot else going on of a punk rock nature. My initial reaction to finishing this book is the same I get when I discover a fantastic new restaurant ( Republica Empanada in Mesa, AZ) -- I want to take friends and family to it. Whereas women's collective culture is often based on opening up sincerely about things on which either a) I probably feel or experience differently from everyone else there, and about which I learned half a lifetime ago that I CBA with the weird looks and silences, or b) I don't want to share with people like that, and definitely not in a group.

If you are like me and love food, watching Top Chef and Food Channel, think that cooking is art, an outlet for creativity, consider chefs featured on such shows (including Anthony Bourdain) as super-sophisticated artists, you are up for a surprise with this book. Halfway through this book I remembered I don't have the slightest bit of interest in the culinary arts whatsoever.

Bourdain's prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois. He was like that girl you know in class but have never given much real attention to (only later to discover she is witty, wicked, and everything you want in a lover and fear in a daughter).Head and tail of spine very slightly crumpled, pages lightly browned, front free endpaper very lightly creased with an impression the size of a thumb otherwise a clean and sound copy of a very scarce item in wrapper with slight shelf-wear to edges. After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain decides to tell all. THE CLASSIC BESTSELLER: 'The greatest book about food ever written''A compelling book with its intriguing mix of clever writing and kitchen patois . It captures the combination of awful practices, bleak hours, myriad of injuries, sexual harassment and cursing, simultaneously explaining why people still choose to live that life.