SOURCE: "The Art of Aging," The New York Times Book Review, May 29, 1983, pp. 10-11.

In the following review, Taliaferro assesses Sister Age as an artful though uneven collection of meditations on aging.

To describe M. F. K. Fisher as the doyenne of food writers would be an absurd reduction, as if one were to call Mozart the greatest Freemason composer or Cézanne the leading painter of apples. Food, it is true, often happens to be Fisher's subject, but the narrow certainties of the home economist and the restaurant critic have no place in her gastronomic or her emotional vocabulary. She is, after all, the philosopher who wrote years ago (in How to Cook a Wolf, 1942), "No recipe in the world is independent of the tides, the moon, the physical and emotional temperatures surrounding its performance." It is for her dauntless appreciation of those physical and emotional temperatures...