Anthony Bourdain has died!

What a shock!  Just after Kate Spade’s suicide the news reports today that Anthony Bourdain passed away from suicide. That lovable, deep voiced, tall, slender gray-hair man, who ate anything and everything, who could have you believing that eating goat testicles was a journey into culinary heaven, is gone. Not just gone but died by his own hands.  

Suicide has been on the rise. Since 1999, it has risen 30%  in middle-aged men and women. Children’s suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death in children. For goodness sake! What is going on!?

What was going on inside Bourdain mind that would cause him to hang himself? We witnessed a rather jovial personality displayed on TV. His first food and world-travel television show was A Cook’s Tour, which ran for 35 episodes on the Food Network from 2002 through 2003. In 2005 he began hosting the Travel Channel’s culinary and cultural adventure programs Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (2005–2012) and The Layover(2011–2013). In 2013, he switched to CNN to host Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

Bourdain’s breakthrough writing piece that was in the New Yorker circa 1999, was Don’t Eat Before Reading, a funny take of behind the scenes at restaurants. After reading that story, I thought twice about eating out. It took me years to dine from a buffet again. Here are some books that Bourdain wrote.

• Kitchen Confidential
• Medium Raw: A bloody Valentine to the World of Food And The People Who Cook
• No Reservations: Around The World on an Empty Stomach
• A Cook’s tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
• Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical
• The Booby Gold Stories

A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—now with all-new, never-before-published material.

Medium Raw marks the return of the inimitable Anthony Bourdain, author of the blockbuster bestseller Kitchen Confidential and three-time Emmy Award-nominated host of No Reservations on TV’s Travel Channel. Bourdain calls his book, “A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook,” and he is at his entertaining best as he takes aim at some of the biggest names in the foodie world, including David Chang, Alice Waters, the Top Chef winners and losers, and many more.

More than just a companion to the hugely popular Travel Channel show, No Reservations is Bourdain’s fully illustrated journal of his far-flung travels. The book traces his trips from New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, mixing beautiful, never-before-seen photos and mementos with Bourdain’s outrageous commentary on what really happens when you give a bad-boy chef an open ticket to the world. Want to know where to get good fatty crab in Rangoon? How to order your reindeer medium rare? How to tell a Frenchman that his baguette is invading your personal space?
This is your book. For any Bourdain fan, this is an indispensable opportunity to hit the road with the man himself.

The only thing “gonzo gastronome” and internationally bestselling author Anthony Bourdain loves as much as cooking is traveling. Inspired by the question, “What would be the perfect meal?,” Tony sets out on a quest for his culinary holy grail, and in the process turns the notion of “perfection” inside out. From California to Cambodia, A Cooks’ Tour chronicles the unpredictable adventures of America’s boldest and bravest chef.

It is a shame for someone to give up on life, but you never know what is going on in other people’s minds. And we all know that all the money in the world cannot make you happy.

A toast to Anthony Bourdain. May is cooking in heaven now.

By Terry Ryan