RIP Anthony Bourdain

[suzzer99]

Best article I've seen yet: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/an...ling-the-truth

Another way of putting it is that Anthony Bourdain built his career on the telling of truth. The son of a French father and an American mother (Gladys Bourdain, writing as G. S. Bourdain, was a writer and a copy editor at the Times), he was a novelist before he became an essayist, but, even in the realm of fiction—as in his series of sardonic crime thrillers, including the novels “Bone in the Throat” and “Gone Bamboo”—he evinced a fascination with how people lived within and around their ill behaviors. “Guys who wake up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, shave, then go to work at the serious business of committing felonies,” he wrote in “A Life of Crime,” an essay in his collection “Medium Raw.” “These are the characters who continue to dominate my reverie.” In crime there’s not just transgression, there’s clarity: being in the conspiracy, knowing the inner workings of the machine, seeing what’s really going on. This was the engine that powered “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” Bourdain’s 1999 New Yorker story that stripped the elegant window dressing from the world of high-end restaurants—the article that, in short order, evolved into his blockbuster 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.”