About the Author

John Weston is also the author of six works of fiction, including Hail, Hero!, basis for the 1969 film; Goat Songs, a trio of novellas; and most recently The Boy Who Sang the Birds. Before retiring, he was Professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, and previously taught creative writing and was director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona.

Reviews

"Weston has fond memories of his life in the Southwest, where he grew up during the Great Depression. Mostly he recalls his mother, Eloine, whose food he continues to relish. She started out as a southern cook, but the Southwest, with its game and its peppers, transformed her cuisine. Together, mother and son also learned to make the best of the deprivations brought on first by the Depression and then by wartime rationing. Within this text, Weston reproduces many of his mother's best recipes, turning this memoir into a virtual cookbook that proves as welcome in the kitchen as in the armchair." --Booklist "Weston's writing is vivid and powerful." --Library Journal "Like all good memoirs, this one is rendered with love but not sentimentality." --Body & Soul "Full of rich flavors . . . In delightful meanders, he covers a lot of topics besides childhood memories. It's an engaging book and easy to read." --East Oregonian "Weston knows how to grab one's attention from the very first page when we find ourselves eating barbecued mountain lion. . . . His mother emerges from this book in such elegantly understated prose that we find ourselves falling in love with her. She's painted with no sentiment, no glossing over, and thus she comes across as one of the millions of heroic people of that era who suffered from a damnable poverty and survived--and made sure the family survived as well." --RALPH "The author is revealed as a generous, loving man who can write of total poverty without asking us for pity. . . . This is most definitely the kind of man one would want to have as a friend." --Red Rock News "Skillfully written, containing much of the truth of Depression-era life in the rural Southwest, Weston's book is eminently worthwhile. One suspects that many of these recipes would be worth trying as well." --Southwest Book Views