Yes This Makes Me Better Than You

The other day I mentioned a book I was loving, Down and Out in Paris and London. And VOILA! just today Anthony Bourdain wrote that the book was single-handedly responsible for his own classic Kitchen Confidential:

During those times, Down and Out in Paris and London sustained me. It made me feel I was not alone, that I was part of something, a tradition, a cult, a secret… something… that stretched back to the 1920s in Paris, and beyond. It held me together, gave me the strength to show up again the next day and the next, until they did give me my name back and I went home having won, for the first time in my life, a modicum of respect from other human beings whose respect I wanted. I went home respecting myself—another first.