Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship

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Although the food (I am partial to the roast chicken, lovingly described) is excellent, it is the charming and effortlessly wise company that makes this sweet read a charming way to pass a day. Edward is teaching Isabel the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think through everything she does, to deconstruct her own life, cutting it back to the bone and examining the guts, no matter how messy that proves to be. A glorious and sentimental story of how two people a generation apart help each other through troubled times. He was teaching me the art of patience, the luxury of slowing down and taking the time to think through everything I did. She can sing "Girl from Ipanema" in Portuguese, and was the last journalist to interview bossa nova's greatest composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim.

A delightful book about a friendship that accepts time passing, savouring without rushing and accepting that life cannot remain stationary. This might just be my cold, cynical English self showing, but some parts of this book just rang a little false. Her first book, See No Evil, goes behind the scenes in one of Latin America's biggest kidnapping cases.Edward is an amateur gourmet chef and loves to cook for friends, so Isabel becomes a frequent visitor.

The book jumps around a lot into different moments in time but never really gets into great detail about anything. Like Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie, it's a book that makes you think about the things that matter in life: love, family, and making the most of the time you have. For even a shared bowl of chowder could transform loneliness and anxiety into friendship, freedom, and a pure, simple pleasure Isabel had not known she could find again.Her writing falls short of the level of detail that I want to read about in this developing relationship. As to great books about good food I'd recommend any one of the dozens of America's Test Kitchen cookbooks. She was also adjusting to life in New York City as an investigative reporter after previous jobs as a foreign correspondent. Virtually friendless in New York City and mired in a miserable, increasingly deteriorating marriage, Isabel finds herself being lovingly nurtured by Edward, learning life lessons that reach far beyond the food he so carefully prepares for her.

On a superficial level their connection may seem like a friendship, and that's definitely how the author presents it. As they progressed from meals à deux to full dinner parties with an eclectic New York crowd, she saw that Edward was showing her how to rediscover the joy of life. Do Americans really get together and then proclaim joyfully to one another, ‘This has been the greatest night of my life, I won’t ever forget it’? In addition to certain standard Google cookies, reCAPTCHA sets a necessary cookie (_GRECAPTCHA) when executed for the purpose of providing its risk analysis.

Edit 6/28/2020: See comment below from Stephanie about how the author explains her recollection of the meals. Edward was a charming Southern gentleman who had come to New York hoping for an acting career, although he ended up working as a welder and a tailor. Edward is a marvel of resilience and dignity, and Vincent shows us that the ceremony of food is really a metaphor for love.