A candid new book explores Anthony Bourdain’s trials
Sometimes getting everything you want can be as disastrous as failing to
By the time Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in a French hotel room on June 8th 2018, he was the envy of food-obsessed travellers the world over. Twenty years earlier he had been a competent but unknown chef with frustrated literary ambitions and a louche, drug-filled past. Then “Kitchen Confidential”, his book of 2000, became a surprise bestseller, and launched a series of increasingly ambitious television shows built around a simple concept: “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The weight of the world”
Culture October 15th 2022
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From the October 15th 2022 edition
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