Description:
Barbara Smith, lifestyle expert. Restaurateur, TV host, columnist, former model, magazine publisher (B. Smith Style). You might want to add shaman to the list, if you are to take at all seriously her latest triumph of project vision and organization, B. Smith: Rituals and Celebrations. Smith has conveniently divided the year into 12 months and provided a vision of a celebration or ritual for each month. Christmas/Kwanzaa is obvious enough. So too is Valentine's Day. March, however, is about a young girl's rite of passage. Throughout the chapters you will find menus, recipes, and instructions for creating special ritualistic and celebratory atmospheres. For example, Dana's Rite of Passage Dinner includes Plantain and Sweet Potato Chips, salad, Oven-Barbecued Short Ribs of Beef, Spicy Braised Cabbage with Cashews, and Kale Mashed Potatoes. The food, by and large, is what you would find in any upscale deli, or provided by a trendy caterer. While the "look" has vision, it seems based on what's available by credit card from any of several catalog companies. If you read the acknowledgements closely, you'll discover that it doesn't hurt to have a personal executive assistant, a makeup artist, a hair designer, a fashion stylist, food stylists, recipe developers, prop stylists, and craft-designer artists, should you not really have enough time in your own life to make all the goodies to give to guests. B. Smith Style magazine will do for the reader and idea-seeker all that this book tries to accomplish. Somehow it all seems more appropriate between the kind of soft covers you can recycle without too much thought. --Schuyler Ingle
| 
