<DIV>Although <I>My Kitchen Wars</I> is a war story, this time the warrior is a woman and the battleground the kitchen. Her weapons—the <I>batterie de cuisine</I> of grills and squeezers and knives—evoke a lifetime's need to make dinner, love, and war. By prying open the past with these implements, Betty Fussell gives voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped and yet simultaneously silenced by an era of domestic strife and global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam.</DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV><I>My Kitchen Wars</I> also is a love story, recounting Fussell's liberation from the tyrannical Puritanism of her family by a veteran of the “Good War,” a young writer named Paul Fussell. But she soon finds herself captive again, constrained by the roles of faculty wife and mother. Still, she cannot stop hungering for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and mind brings down the marriage in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bruised, emerges to cook another dinner and to tell her tale in this fierce and funny memoir. <I>My Kitchen Wars</I> was adapted into a one-woman play performed in Hollywood and New York.</DIV>