13 to Life Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I'm gonna be brief because i don't particularly enjoy reading long reviews. All I'll say is I was sadly disappointed. I was looking forward to reading this, intrigued by the caption, and bought it as soon as I could. It took me a month to get through, and I'm surprised I even finished it. And I read books FAST. The characters make decisions that I simply don't understand, cause most of their problems due to these silly decisions, and there is honestly no depth to the plot. The book is like reading a list of problems and seeing a bunch of characters you don't particularly care about mope around in self pity. I don't mean to sound harsh, but this book really was such a let down. Though the author does leave potential for an interesting sequel, indicating toward the end (which, if you do read the book, I'd skip to because it's the only time in which anything happens) that the plot may pick up from there, I don't know if I'll bother to read it because of my extreme disappointment with this one. Maybe I'm just getting a wee bit tired of all this repetitive paranormal romance, but I haven't had any other problems in the genre recently. Maybe the sequel will be better. Anyway, unoriginal (or for those that were original, incomplete) plot lines and some characters that just fell flat with me. It seems that the majority of reviews differed from mine, which surprised me, but maybe I'm just impatient for a really riveting read which this was not. Disappointing, but not the worst I've ever read.

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The Wise Guy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes From My Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Don't dis the Sopranos book -- just don't say it's the same thing as this. The Sopranos Family Cookbook is marketing with good recipes, whereas Henry Hill's masterpiece here is as much a retelling of his biography as it is an excellent Sicilian-American cookbook with a heavy emphasis on making do when you can't get what you need.
I think the recipe that sums this book up best is the Oven Penitentiary Sauce, a concoction that Henry and his prison buddies cooked up for those days when the guards have taken all your pots and pans away and all you've got is the steam table pans and the prison bakery. The whole book is like that -- real food, salvaged when something goes wrong. Lots of Italian, but a few surprises from other parts of the country (particularly the South), reflecting Henry's travels in Witness Protection. Substitutions are a big deal too -- from the pork-for-veal scam Hill learned as a kid working in a pizzeria all the way up. Hill's message to cooks: you can always find a way to make it work.
At my bookstore we sold a couple of hundred copies of the Sopranos book over the Holidays, and that was pretty cool. But I had two standard recommendations to go along with that -- Italian Classics from Cooks Illustrated and this one. Of all three (and I say buy them all), fuhgeddaboutit, this is the best -- it's very autobiographical, and will leave you very, very hungry at the end.

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Henry Hill was a born wiseguy, and his love of food got him through both the good and bad times. Even cooking on the run in the Federal Witness Protection Program-where prosciutto was impossible to find and gravy was something you put on mashed potatoes-he managed to keep good Italian food on the table. He still brings this flair for improvisation to his cooking. No recipe is set in stone. And substitutions are listed just in case. Now, in his inimitable style, Hill tells some spicy stories of his life in the Mob and out, and shows readers how to whip up his favorite dishes, Sicilian-style-recipes to make even the toughest tough-guy beg for more... Mom's Antipasto € Sunday Gravy (Meat Sauce) € Cheaters Chicken Stock € Striped Bass for Paulie € Fat Larry's Pizza Dough € Henry's Kickback Antipasti Hero € Sicilian Easter Bread with Colored Eggs € Clams Casino € Osso Bucco € Oven Penitentiary Sauce with Sausage € Michael's Favorite Ziti with Meat Sauce € and many others

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