A candid new book explores Anthony Bourdain’s trials

By the time Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in a French hotel room on June 8th 2018, he was the envy of food-obsessed travellers the world over. Twenty years earlier he had been a competent but unknown chef with frustrated literary ambitions and a louche, drug-filled past. Then “Kitchen Confidential”, his book of 2000, became a surprise bestseller, and launched a series of increasingly ambitious television shows built around a simple concept: “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”