From the author's website:
A story of food and love, injury and healing, Keeping the Feast is a memoir of nourishment and restoration in Italy after a long period of tragedy, and a contemplation of the extraordinary sustaining powers of food, family, friendship, and grace. It’s the story of my family, and what happened to it after a single bullet, fired by a sniper two days before Christmas 1989 in the brief mayhem of Romania’s overthrow of its Communist dictator, nearly killed my husband, John Tagliabue of The New York Times. It’s the story of the reverberations set off by that one bullet up and down the generations of our entire family, and how we fought for nearly twenty years to find the new place in the world to which that bullet sent us all.


Don't read this book while hungry. Paula's got the gift of describing something so that it becomes multi-dimensional, and her descriptions of her dinners and food in general will have you salivating. Her heartache is told in a matter of fact way that had me compelled to find out the ending, but the memoir didn't pull me in as much as I had hoped. A beautifully crafted memoir centering on picking up the pieces after tragedy, I'd recommend this to fans of Julie and Julia.