Last week, a friend offered me a short stack of free books, and each one carried a food theme. I chose this one from the pile. Most of what I knew about Julia Child came from watching the 2009 movie, Julie & Julia, although I also vaguely remember catching her cooking show on television in the 1960s, when I was a child (!) myself. I thought I might learn more here, since Julia was a fascinating person.

This book is a collection of transcripts from six interviews conducted with Julia Child between 1961 and 2004. The conversations range both in length and in focus. Actually, anyone who has seen Julie & Julia will find familiar ground here. Some natural repetition occurs among the segments.

The most engaging exchanges are when new information is introduced. Julia talks more about the details of her government work in the 1940s-50s, during an interview with Jewell Fanzi of the Foreign Affairs Oral History Project in 1991. She provides behind-the-scenes views of the production process of her various television programs, when she talks with Michael Rosen at the Television Academy Foundation in 1999. These are two gems to unearth among the pages.

In transcript form, the text conveys the back-and-forth nature of each conversation. Period. It's similar to raw footage of a film, before editing. If each piece had been fleshed out into a narrative write-up, more facts and clarifications would have been added in order to present a more rounded consideration of this cultural icon of a woman. As the interviews are given to us here, they're merely superficially interesting.

When I finished one transcript and proceeded to the next, questions grew in my mind. Why? Why was this book published? Why, in 2019, or even, at all? Helen Rosner's glowing introduction provides biographical and background information that the six interviews lack. But other than highlighting the uniqueness of Julia's speech, Helen doesn't give us a good reason for this book to exist. And why was it released in 2019? Julia Child passed away in 2004. Julie Powell's book, Julie & Julia, appeared in 2005. The subsequent movie hit the screens in 2009. Ten years later, this 140-page volume containing six interviews showed up. Why? Why then? And why were these particular transcripts chosen? Were they the only ones that could be easily located?

All in all, I'm not sure the goal of this publication was achieved. If you are an avid Julia Child fan who wants to know and to have everything, then sure, you could shelve this one next to your well-weathered copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. If you want to learn more about Julia Child's life, though, you'll have to look elsewhere for a substantial main course. This one is a mere appetizer. And it's not a very filling one, at that.