Survival Kit Archive

2004
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Oct
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Dec

2003
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec

2002
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October 2004

Ruth Reichl

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Ruth Reichl has always seen the world in terms of food. In her two memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, the important events and people in her life are always defined by the meals that accompanied them. And she transformed the art of restaurant reviewing, in her decades at the New York Times and the L.A. Times, by emphasizing the whole dining experience, not just individual dishes. Let’s find out what the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine is packing in her Survival Kit, or perhaps I should say "Survival picnic basket".

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Nikki Giovanni

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Nikki Giovanni has always forged her own path through life. She self-published her first volumes of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement, because they were considered out of the mainstream at that time. And as a result, she became a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s. Over the years she's developed a loyal readership for the 2 dozen adult and children's books that followed; she became a single mother by choice long before it became fashionable, and in recent years she's revealed her fight against cancer (which she's faced with courage and humor.) Let’s see what this iconoclastic, independent woman has put into her Survival Kit.

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David Halberstam

Sunday, October 10, 2004

David Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his reporting on the Vietnam War; his book The Best and the Brightest is considered the definitive work on that conflict. His other books, including The Powers That Be, The Reckoning, The Breaks of the Game, The Fifties, The Children, and War in a Time of Peace, have dissected the civil rights movement, U.S. foreign policy, professional and amateur sports, the power of the media and the automobile industry. What does this man, who has examined the workings of almost every aspect of American society, consider essential to his cultural survival? Let’s ask him.

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Zoe Caldwell

Sunday, October 03, 2004

Zoe Caldwell has always gone wherever the acting jobs took her; from her native Australia to Stratford-upon-Avon in Britain, then on to Canada, and eventually New York. She's won four Tony Awards, has played opposite such legends as Laurence Olivier, Dame Edith Evans and Paul Robeson, and her portrayals of Cleopatra and Maria Callas (among others) have been declared the definitive ones. She's always preferred to perform before a live audience, and although we can only promise her an audience of moose and wolves on her retreat, she has graciously agreed to give us her survival kit list for a journey to the wilds.