Heat: A Chef's Journey

Bill Buford was a fiction editor for The New Yorker who started out to profile chef Mario Batali and ended up quitting his job and going into cooking in a big way. His subtitle: "An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany."

This new book, which received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly, has received positive reviews in this weekend's Washington Post ("charming, crazy")and Newsday ("beautiful, infectious").

USA Today published an interview with the author on Friday.

Sounds like a fun read; I'll be looking into this one further.