My Kitchen Wars

A veteran of the era's domestic battles takes no prisoners in a fierce and funny memoir. My Kitchen Wars is a war story, but the warrior is a woman, and the battleground is the kitchen. Her weapons-the batterie de cuisine of grills and squeezers and knives-evoke a lifelong need to make dinner, love, and war. With these implements, Betty Fussell pries open the past, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped but also silenced by an era of global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam. This is also a love story, as Fussell is liberated from the tyrannical puritanism of her family by a veteran of the "Good War," a young writer named Paul Fussell. But in the role of bride, Fussell finds herself captive as faculty wife and mother. She hungers for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and intellect brings down the marriage, in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bloodied, emerges to cook another dinne