The Last, Painful Days of Anthony Bourdain

THE NEW YORK TIMES: A new, unauthorized biography reveals intimate, often raw, details of the TV star’s life, including his tumultuous relationship with the Italian actor Asia Argento. And it’s drawing criticism from many of his friends and family.

A new book about Anthony Bourdain reveals fresh details about his life and last days. | Alex Welsh for The New York Times
After Anthony Bourdain took his own life in a French hotel room in 2018, his close friends, family and the people who for decades had helped him become an international TV star closed ranks against the swarm of media inquiries and stayed largely silent, especially about his final days.

That silence continued until 2021, when many in his inner circle were interviewed for the documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” and for “Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.” The two works showed a more complex side of Mr. Bourdain, who had become increasingly conflicted about his success and had in his last two years made his relationship with the Italian actor Asia Argento his primary focus. But neither directly addressed how very messy his life had become in the months that led up to the night he hanged himself at age 61.

On Oct. 11, Simon & Schuster will publish what it calls the first unauthorized biography of the writer and travel documentarian. “Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain” is filled with fresh, intimate details, including raw, anguished texts from the days before Mr. Bourdain’s death, such as his final exchanges with Ms. Argento and Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, his wife of 11 years who, by the time they separated in 2016, had become his confidante.

“I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job,” Mr. Bourdain wrote to Ms. Busia-Bourdain in one of their near-daily text exchanges. “I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”

Drawing on more than 80 interviews, and files, texts and emails from Mr. Bourdain’s phone and laptop, the journalist Charles Leerhsen traces Mr. Bourdain’s metamorphosis from a sullen teenager in a New Jersey suburb that his family couldn’t afford to a heroin-shooting kitchen swashbuckler who struck gold as a writer and became a uniquely talented interpreter of the world through his travels.

Mr. Leerhsen said in an interview that he wanted to write a book without the dutiful sheen of what he called “an official Bourdain product.” Indeed, he portrays a man who at the end of his life was isolated, injecting steroids, drinking to the point of blackout and visiting prostitutes, and had all but vanished from his 11-year-old daughter’s life. » | Kim Severson * | Tuesdaay, September 27, 2022

* Kim Severson reports on the nation’s food culture. She had interviewed Anthony Bourdain several times and led coverage of his death.

‘I am lonely’: controversial book reveals Anthony Bourdain’s final days: Family and friends are upset by new biography divulging Bourdain’s moods – and texts – in the lead-up to his death »

Behind a Top Female Name in Spanish Crime Fiction: Three Men

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Carmen Mola, a novelist publishing under a pen name, seemed to shatter a glass ceiling in the world of Spanish books. But when the author’s true identity was revealed while claiming a big prize, it was a shock.

Jorge Díaz, Antonio Mercero and Agustín Martínez receiving the Planeta prize for their novel “La Bestia,” written under the pseudonym Carmen Mola. | Josep Lago/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
MADRID — In a literary world long crowded with successful men, some held up the popularity of Carmen Mola as an example that times were changing in Spain.

Publishing under a pseudonym, the writer produced a detective trilogy with an eccentric female police inspector as the protagonist, plumbing the underworld for clues to crimes. The public was led to believe Carmen Mola was a married, female professor who lived in Madrid, but knew little else.

The mysteries, both within the plots of the novels and surrounding the author’s identity, were a recipe for success, selling hundreds of thousands of books in the Spanish-speaking world. But the greatest surprise of all came this month during a ceremony attended by the Spanish king where Carmen Mola was awarded the Planeta Prize, a literary award worth more than a million dollars.

A team of three stepped up to receive the prize. All of them were men. » | Nicholas Casey | Friday, October 29, 2021

How Did a Gay Scientist of Jewish Descent Thrive Under the Nazis?

THE NEW YORK TIMES: RAVENOUS Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection By Sam Apple

At the start of the 20th century, the German Empire was the undisputed hub of the scientific universe. From 1901, when the Nobel Prizes were established, through 1932, Germans won almost a third of all the Nobels awarded to scientists — 31 in total. (American scientists, in contrast, won five during the same time period.) This impressive track record was fueled, in part, by Jewish researchers who just decades earlier would have been excluded from prominent academic positions. When the Nazis seized power in March 1933, it was not unusual for major scientific institutes to be led by Nobel laureates with Jewish roots: Albert Einstein and Otto Meyerhof, both Jewish, ran prestigious centers of physics and medical research; Fritz Haber, who’d converted from Judaism in the late 19th century, ran a chemistry institute; and Otto Warburg, who was raised as a Protestant but had two Jewish grandparents, was the director of a recently opened center for cell physiology. » | Seth Mnookin | Sunday, June 6, 2021