Bill Buford looks like an old soccer goalie: slightly ravaged, but wily, with a glint of madness in his eyes, cloaked by a genial-looking half-grin.  So it is no surprise that his first book, Among the Thugs, was about his time among the British soccer (football) hooligans and their violent antics, extreme loyalty, and cultish, near unexplainable behavior.  Full disclosure: I've only read an excerpt from this book, but I knew that I liked Buford's style from that small snippet.  There's an ease to his prose, light though never half-hearted, even when he's describing the chaos of a public rumble.  He's funny but never forced; he lets his characters speak for themselves, while allowing himself the occasional flight of fancy, pulling us into his own imaginative, over-thinking mind.

When I saw he had finished his second book, Heat, where he profiled both the uber-celebrity chef Mario Batali and his own experience as line cook at Batali's famed NYC eatery Babbo, along with the author's adventures in Tuscan self-education with a wild bevy of local food artisans, I knew I had to seek it out.  I played soccer as a kid, like you. Our first season we went 0-9.  (After the last game, my dad--our coach--tore open a cardboard box full of gold-gleaming plastic bodies and handed each of us a trophy.  And thus began my unrealistic expectations for success, even while failing miserably.  But this does not concern you, or the book.  Moving on.)  Point is, soccer, even a narrative based entirely on the violence inspired by it, never tweaked my narrative-loving bone.  But food!  Ah, food.  This was a subject I could sink my...  meat thermometer into.  When I saw Heat on a rack at my local library book sale, for two dollars, I nabbed it.  For the price of a cookie at Starbucks, I bought a feast spanning the tables and back-rooms of New York City's finest, most eccentric (and quotable) red-haired, Croc-wearing chef, and entrance into the old world of Tuscan food mythology.  And, having finished and digested Buford's newest tome, I can easily say this: I am sated. 

And you will be, too.  Even if you don't like cooking, or watch the Food Network, or chop your pre-sliced Honey Cured Ham slices with rapid and unnecessary precision just to pretend to have exquisite knife skills, you will enjoy this book.  Why?  It's inhabited by real, full-of-life, ambituous, heart-broken, slightly insane, sometimes frightening, always genuine people. Buford is the first.  The author here acts as guide and host, and without our trust in him, the ensuing strangess would be tough to believe.  Luckily, he spends as much time berating himself and calling attention to his own fallibility as he does pointing out the idiosyncrasies of his subjects--we trust him since he barely trusts himself.  And we relate to that self-doubt, even when it flies in the face of his obvious accomplishment (the product of which sits in your hand, while he explains how inept he is throughout. He couldn't have been so clueless, or the book would have been called Simmer: Why My Dreams Are Now On the Back-Burner.) 

He begins as a Kitchen Slave, though he uses more colorful language in the text (as a good line cook would), and works his way through the Italian food tradition: From cooking Brasato al Barolo as Line Cook, to learning the art of renaissance ravioli as a Pasta Maker, to unearthing the secrets of the thigh as an Apprentice, to understanding the fruits of the cow as Tuscan Butcher.  While we view Buford becoming each of these things, we come to understand that the same titles really describe the master teacher under which he learns; each chapter is a profile of, and education from, one or even several practitioners of an art seldom known today.  As Buford puts it, in the nearest thing to a conclusive soliliquy as appears in the book, "For millenia, people have known how to make their food.  They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer's knowledge of the way the planet works.  They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expresions of their families.  People don't have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth... I didn't want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human."

Memoir, Quest narrative, Travelogue, Meditation, Instruction Manual?  Heat is all these things, as written by a very intelligent, observant, funny guy who just wants to learn as much as he can with the time he still has.  His passions become ours; his triumphs our conquests, if only vicariously.  When the Dante-quoting butcher of the subtitle, Dario, tells him, "You are now a member of the carnal confederation of butchers," you, the reader, will want to grab a blade and slice your own thigh, just to feel one with the convocation.  Dario continues, in what I'll use as a final thought, an appropriately virile synopsis of the spirit of this book: "'You are learning to work with meat like a butcher.  You must now make love like a butcher.  For the rest of the night, you must enact the dark acts of carnality, a butcher's carnality.  And then you will rise in the hours before dawn, smelling of carnality, and unload the meat from the truck, like a butcher.'"  Buford reflects on this, writing,  "I didn't know what to say.  My boss was telling me that, to do my job, I now needed to go home and have sex. [...] It seemed unlikely that I had the stamina for more carnality and making butcher love to my wife for the rest of the night and reporting for work before dawn with no sleep.  Maybe I didn't have the constitution for this life after all.  But, you know, I did the best I could."

He certainly did.