Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child

Product Description

It’s rare for someone to emerge in America who can change our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture. It’s even rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV station. And yet, that’s exactly what Julia Child did. The warble-voiced doyenne of television cookery became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule-breaker as she touched off the food revolution that has gripped America for more than fifty years.

Now, in Bob Spitz’s definitive, wonderfully affectionate biography, the Julia we know and love comes vividly — and surprisingly — to life. In Dearie, Spitz employs the same skill he brought to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book The Beatles, providing a clear-eyed portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential Americans of our time — a woman known to all, yet known by only a few.

At its heart, Dearie is a story about a woman’s search for her own unique expression. Julia Child was a directionless, gawky young woman who ran off halfway around the world to join a spy agency during World War II. She eventually settled in Paris, where she learned to cook and collaborated on the writing of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book that changed the food culture of America. She was already fifty when The French Chef went on the air — at a time in our history when women weren’t making those leaps. Julia became the first educational TV star, virtually launching PBS as we know it today; her marriage to Paul Child formed a decades-long love story that was romantic, touching, and quite extraordinary.

A fearless, ambitious, supremely confident woman, Julia took on all the pretensions that embellished tony French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for everything that has happened since in American cooking, from TV dinners and Big Macs to sea urchin foam and the Food Channel. Julia Child’s story, however, is more than the tale of a talented woman and her sumptuous craft. It is also a saga of America’s coming of age and growing sophistication, from the Depression Era to the turbulent sixties and the excesses of the eighties to the greening of the American kitchen. Julia had an effect on and was equally affected by the baby boom, the sexual revolution, and the start of the women’s liberation movement.

On the centenary of her birth, Julia finally gets the biography she richly deserves. An in-depth, intimate narrative, full of fresh information and insights, Dearie is an entertaining, all-out adventure story of one of our most fascinating and beloved figures.

Amazon.com Review

Featured Essay: Author Bob Spitz on Dearie

Because Julia Child is such a familiar and beloved presence in our culture, it is amazing how much there was left to learn about her. Julie and Julia, along with Julia's lovely memoir My Life in France only scratched the surface of this remarkable and fascinating woman who actually launched PBS (really!) and defined the American palate. For much of her adolescence and throughout her twenties, Julia was something of a lost soul. She burned with a desire to have an impact on the world but had no idea how to make that happen or what field she might excel in. It disappointed her that she was nothing more than what she called "a social butterfly," without a goal. "I felt I had particular and unique gifts," she wrote in her diary, "that I was meant for something, and was like no one else." How right she was! But she weathered many misadventures before those gifts began to materialize.

Oddly, everything began to coalesce for Julia in Ceylon, of all places. At the outbreak of World War II, still without a sense of purpose, she volunteered for government service and was shipped overseas as a member of the OSS, America's burgeoning spy agency that later became the CIA. She worked in its Registry, under "Wild Bill" Donovan, and was responsible for the location and movements of every U.S. spy operating in the Southeast Asia theater.

In Ceylon, Julia also met her future husband, Paul Child, who worked in a capacity similar to hers. Initially, Julia had had a hard time finding true love--it took her awhile. Back home, the heir to the Los Angeles Times had proposed to her on several occasions, but he struck Julia as too bland for her outsized spirit. She was a big person (over 6'3") with a big personality and couldn't be contained in the expected role of "the little woman." I found it very moving when she finally found true love, although she was still adrift about what her life purpose would be.

A lunch in France changed everything. It was a powerful moment when she hit on her true calling at the age of forty. In the book, I delve into the extraordinary path Julia followed to create eye-poppingly delicious food and introduce it to an American public that was starving for a new, imaginative and creative way to cook. From there, it was through engaging force of her once-troublesome outsized personality that she went on to have a profound impact on the way people eat--and live.

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review

(238 customer reviews)

105 of 110 people found the following review helpful

Good Julia, Bad Julia, July 7, 2012

takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Hardcover)

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

It's amazing that there are so many good biographies of Julia Child. It's also remarkable that all the good ones have something new to bring to her familiar story. The latest is Dearie by Bob Spitz, and as I began the book, I was afraid I was in for a whitewashed version of Julia Child, if not a hagiography. But no - quite the contrary.

As is often the case, the obligatory childhood history is not the most compelling part of the book. Julia McWilliams grew up in privileged circumstances in Pasadena, California, then went to college back east at Smith, where she indulged in hijinks involving as much smoking and drinking as possible. The Prohibition lasted until 1933 and Julia graduated in 1934, so alcohol had even more of a mystique for Julia and her classmates than for most college students.

The story of her career with the OSS during World War II has been told fascinatingly in Jennet Conant's...Read more

55 of 62 people found the following review helpful

Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child, July 25, 2012

Brendan Moody (Randolph, ME, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Hardcover)

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

The most revealing remark in Bob Spitz's new biography of Julia Child comes tucked away in the "Sources and Acknowledgments" section at the very end. Describing the admiration he felt after time spent with the celebrity cook in Sicily in 1992, he writes, "If I have to admit to one prejudice confronting this book, it is that I had a powerful crush on her. Sorry. Deal with it." Spitz's lighthearted aside reflects the deeper truth that his is not a particularly penetrating approach to biography. The mildly worshipful tone of the subtitle's reference to Child's "remarkable life" permeates the book, and traits that a different biographer might have investigated more closely-- the rapid, unapologetic decision-making that sometimes verged on ruthlessness, the seemingly easy acceptance of everything life threw at her-- are passed over. With the exception of a single, poisonously bitter rival, no one ever has anything bad to say about the woman. But that is probably just as well. Not many...Read more

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful

Poorly written, somewhat interesting, August 23, 2012

Marcy L. Thompson (Sammamish, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Hardcover)

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

The problem with this book Is really the author's ornate, often labored style. It reads like a first draft that needs considerable editing and streamlining, or maybe the first attempt to write something serious by someone without much of an ear for language. When you add to that the author's penchant for describing places in much more detail than is required by the narrative, the book feels about 25% longer than it needed to be to tell its story.

The story is, of course, interesting, primarily because Julia Child was, as everyone always says about her, so much larger than life. Her adventures, her enthusiasms, and her choices (and the consequences of those choices) are intrinsically fascinating, and there much about this book that is interesting and enjoyable.

There are other, better books about Julia Child, but there is new material here. I'm glad I read it. I just wish the writing hadn't gotten in the way of the content of the book.