The Dead Celebrity Cookbook Presents: Christmas in Tinseltown

Published:  October 1st, 2012

The Dead Celebrity Cookbook Presents: Christmas in Tinseltown

By: Frank DeCaro, Virginia Bell

Health Communications

ISBN-13: 9780757317002

Now you can put some gam in your holiday ham with The Dead Celebrity Christmas Cookbook. When it comes to holiday fun, the stars of Hollywood's Golden Age knew how to make merry – on stage, on screen, and especially on the dinner table. With The Dead Celebrity Christmas Cookbook – the follow-up to his international sensation The Dead Celebrity Cookbook – Frank DeCaro shows how to put the kitsch into your holiday kitchen as he salutes a quirky collection of celebrities who are gone, but fondly remembered every year at Christmastime.

Filled with pop culture ruminations and genuine (and genuinely delicious) recipes of the stars, The Dead Celebrity Christmas Cookbook hails such movie classics as It's a Wonderful Life and White Christmas, gives three cheers for such time-honored animated gems as Frosty the Snowman and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and puts such offbeat offerings as The Star Wars Holiday Special in their rightful place – the dining room! (summary courtesy of Amazon.com)

Review

     I have a confession to make:  I never read the original Dead Celebrity Cookbook.  But I saw this one available on Netgalley and it looked like just the sort of thing that was right up my alley as a reader.  Granted, Christmas is not my favorite holiday (AT ALL),  but I figured maybe I could get a couple of recipes to use year-round from this thing and some fun anecdotes to read about in regards to famous actors/actresses since gone.  A lot of this cookbook was genuinely fun to read and I could tell that Mr. DeCaro was very passionate about what he was doing.  That said, I sometimes felt like the background info of the specific films (versus the specific stars) overshadowed the actual recipes and only served as filler to create more pages.  Plus, it never even touched on the fact that not EVERY dead celebrity was a Christian that celebrated Christmas.  Some of them had to have been Jewish right?  So where was the Hanukkah section?  I wouldn't have minded that, especially as a reader who isn't Jewish and is always looking to try new things.  But it didn't exist in this particular book.  The chapter names and the puns they created made me smile while I was reading, but overall I felt like this wasn't the cookbook for me or the actor trivia book for me either.  It split too much between trying to be both and didn't really succeed at being one or the other.  A fun book, but not one I would read again.

VERDICT:  3/5  Stars

*I received an Advanced Reading E-book Copy from the publisher, via NetGalley. No money or favors were exchanged for this review. This book was published October 1st, 2012.*