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I enjoyed Bill Buford's writing in the past but this was a letdown, horrible, actually but I don't want to give it one star. It is a tad more worthy than that. First of all, as a decades long editor, he needs an editor! Who really wants to read seventy of pages of indecisions, missed planes, frusterating apartment searches and all of the woes of enrolling his children into an elite pre-kindergarten school. This all reeks of such priviledge that I wonder who he was writing for except a rarified few and certainly not curious cooks who can never afford to eat at the restaurants they work in. Then tireless, humorless pages on working in French kitchens -- peeling potatoes with men who are hostile and arrogant, with only vague descriptions on how their food is prepared. I get that old world kitchens in France are highly regimented but there was not a nice person in the bunch. Buford himself seemed devoid of any humor whatsoever for the often absurd situations he found himself in. I did appreciate some of his descriptions of the countryside but that is about all. I could go on but I won't bother. Simply summarized, I had little interest in his rote memoir that was too often devoid of substance and style and with no self-awareness of how his tone and recollections are really quite elitist and naive. As a kitchen professional myself, and follower of his career since his Granta days (and I still own 20 issues), I was sorely disappointed.