Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (book club reads .txt) 📕

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

PREFACE

PART 1 - STANDING ON THE MILK CRATE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART 2 - A NEW TRAIN OF THOUGHT

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

PART 3 - LIFE, ON THE LINE

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

EPILOGUE

GOTHAM BOOKS

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 1 1 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, March 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Achatz, LLC

All rights reserved

Chicago Tribune article on pages 376-378 reprinted with special permission of the Chicago Tribune; copyright

Chicago Tribune; all rights reserved

The images on pages 234, 235, 237, and 238 are courtesy of Grant Kessler. All other images within the text are courtesy of the author.

Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

has been applied for

eISBN : 978-1-101-47595-9

Set in Apollo MT and Gill Sans

The author wishes to make clear that while this is a work of nonfiction, some of the names, events, and dates have been changed in order to protect the privacy of those involved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

however, the story, the experiences, and the words

are the author’s alone.

http://us.penguingroup.com

PREFACE

On June 8, 2008, I flew to New York to attend the James Beard Foundation Awards. I was nominated for the Outstanding Chef Award. It is the ultimate recognition a chef can get at the Beard Foundation, and arguably the ultimate recognition for an American chef, period. I wanted to win.

I just didn’t want to be there when I won.

Five months earlier I had finished a brutal course of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for stage IVb squamous cell carcinoma. There is no stage V or even a IVc. The cancer was located primarily in my tongue and was a tumor that took up more than 50 percent of the visible part. According to the scans, it had also metastasized to my lymph system, located primarily on the left side of my neck. Everyone certainly hoped it had not spread below my collarbones. If it had, well—time to “get your affairs in order.”

The chemotherapy had left me bald, pimpled, scaled, and sore. The radiation had burned my tongue and face from the inside out. The lining of my esophagus would shed like a snakeskin and I was forced to peel it out of my throat while choking and vomiting. I started the treatment at 172 pounds. By the end I weighed 127.

I couldn’t taste a thing. Nothing. Food was cardboard and salt was just sand in my mouth, dissolving oddly and slowly with no purpose. Eating was a horrific and painful ordeal to be tolerated three or four times a day. Cooking at Alinea became a gauntlet to run every night: wonderful smells that you can’t taste, food you used to love that you can’t eat.

By the time the Beard Awards arrived, I had begun to recover from the treatment. I was in remission and apparently cancer-free. But the healing process would take time, and now I had to show up at Lincoln Center in New York, greet the other chefs, the restaurateurs, and the press.

I wanted to run away. I looked terrible. I had a scraggly goatee because I was unable to shave without peeling away my skin. My hair had started to grow back, but the back of my head was still bald—I looked like a sixteenth-century monk. My legs were sticks and the skin over my rib cage was sunken in. The tuxedo draped over my shoulders like it would on a hanger.

But what really concerned me was that I could barely talk. My tongue was half the size it used to be—it was nearly all tumors, and now those tumors had been vaporized by radiation. It was peeled, red, white, and sore, and the muscles that control it had been atrophied by the radiation. Part of my neck and most of my lymph