"Year in the Life" books

Restaurants/chefs

I don't know if it counts as a genre, but I've always liked reading non-fiction books that follow the year in the life of an institution. The calendar gives the authors an outline to hang their narratives on, and some boundaries. But the books I like use the happenings of a year to give background on the institution, and the people who participate in it. Usually it doesn't just focus on one person or aspect (though I'm including a few diaries/memoirs in my list).

I was surprised at how many books I've read in this category. Actually, I could divide it by general subject area: sports, education, and theater all have defined "seasons" or years where there are definite beginnings and ends. I did some searching in library catalogs for non-fiction books with the words "year" and "life" in the title, and came up with quite a few titles. There are year-in-the-life books about practicing medicine in two different locations: Taking Care of Your Own: A Year in the Life of a Small Hospital, by Susan Garrett, and Surgeon! : a year in the life of an inner-city doctor, by Richard T. Caleel. You can read about a year in the life of a Japanese woman and her family (The secrets of Mariko, by Elisabeth Bumiller) or a year in the life of a pronghorn (Built for speed, by John A. Byers). And not all these kinds of books have "life" and/or "year" in the title: Anne Lamott wrote Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. There are a ton of year-in-the-life books out there I haven't read. Here's a list of ones I have read. My areas of interest do tend towards sports, theater, education, plus restaurants, religion, and business, and other miscellaneous areas.


Restaurants/chefs
Daria, Irene. Lutece: a day in the life of America's greatest restaurant. New York : Random House, 1993.
Daria uses the structure of a day to explain the behind-the-scenes life of a restaurant.

Echikson, William. Burgundy Stars: a year in the life of a great French restaurant. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.
I couldn't remember if this covered one year or more (the blurbs say it covers one). The restaurant is Bernard Loiseau's La Cote d'Or. It focuses mostly on Loiseau; I think there's a fair amount on a sommelier as well. Loiseau is also the subject of The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine, by Rudolph Chelminski, published in 1995. Another one of those books read at the lakeside cabin.

So the first two books let you compare and contrast a French and U.S. restaurant (I read them years apart, unfortunately). Then you can read about the training of American chefs in:

Ruhlman, Michael. Making of a Chef: mastering heat at the Culinary Institute of America. New York: H. Holt, 1997.
This is more of a memoir; the writer is a student at the CIA, though kind of a "special student," doing a shorter course for the purpose of writing a book. Not being much of a cook, I read more about making stock and sauces than I wanted to. There's a lot of description of that. But I liked the book enough to buy Ruhlman's next book on cooking, Soul of a Chef, as soon as it came out (I'm finally reading it now!). And he's got a third book on professional cooking, Reach of a Chef. Ruhlman says one of his interests is the experience of the pursuit of perfection. It's definitely a big part of Soul of a Chef. But I don't know how many insights I got into that pursuit in Making of a Chef.

Other entries with "Year in the Life" books: June 22, 2006 –part II: education; August 26, 2006 –part III: theater and business; Oct 11, 2006–part IVa: sports; Feb 21, 2007–part IVb: sports; March 28, 2007–part V: religion; April 6, 2007–part IVc: sports; and May 2, 2007–part VI: miscellaneous.