Recommended Reading Lists > Staff Picks > May 2008
Recommended Book
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
ISBN: 9780670018222
Title: The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School
Author: Kathleen Flinn
KDL Description:
Recounts the author’s decision to change careers and attend the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, an education during which she survived the program’s intense teaching methods, competitive fellow students, and the dynamics of falling in love, in an account complemented by two dozen recipes.
Amazon Description:
A delightful true story of food, Paris, and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream
In 2003, Kathleen Flinn, a thirty-six-year-old American living and working in London, returned from vacation to find that her corporate job had been eliminated. Ignoring her mother’s advice that she get another job immediately or “never get hired anywhere ever again,” Flinn instead cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream — a diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry is the touching and remarkably funny account of Flinn’s transformation as she moves through the school’s intense program and falls deeply in love along the way. Flinn interweaves more than two dozen recipes with a unique look inside Le Cordon Bleu amid battles with demanding chefs, competitive classmates, and her “wretchedly inadequate” French. Flinn offers a vibrant portrait of Paris, one in which the sights and sounds of the city’s street markets and purveyors come alive in rich detail.
The ultimate wish fulfillment book, her story is a true testament to pursuing a dream. Fans of Julie & Julia, Almost French, and Eat, Pray, Love will be amused, inspired, and richly rewarded by this seductive tale of romance, Paris, and French food.

