BOOK REVIEW : '' BE READY : WHEN THE LUCK HAPPENS ''.

''Be Ready When the Luck Happens : A Memoir'' By Ina Garten. Crown.

Many books open with epigraphs. Maybe Plato, the Bible or Oscar Wilde; usually lofty, and generally by a long dead stranger.

Ina Garten begins her memoir, '' Be Ready When the Luck Happens,'' with the following : '' Do what you love. If you love it, you'll be very good at it.''

It's attributed to her husband, Jeffrey Garten, familiar to fans as a loving, steady presence and a key part of Ina Garten's brand as a wildly successful cookbook author and TV personality.

The quote from Mr. Garten, a noted economist better known to viewers as an affable and hungry helpmeet, does indeed sum up the themes of his wife's book - and serves as a good barometer for your enjoyment of it. This is a story about good fortune, work and being obsessed with your husband.

Garten's gift has been to make everything look effortless : the recipes in her 13 cookbooks ; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa ; the many occasions when she's advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network.

In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.

Instead of beginning chronologically, or even in medias res, Garten opens when her life really started : in 1965, when she is a high school senior and Jeffrey Garten a sophomore at Dartmouth.

We move to 1978, when she spots an ad in the Sunday New York Times, It's for a catering and food shop in the  Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa, named after an Ava Gardner movie, that promises '' to gross over six figures in summer alone.''

She buys it for $20,000 despite working in Washington, D.C. and having no real experience in the food industry. It works out :

'' You bake cookies, you sell cookies, and if the cookies don't sell, you make something else that customer's will love and WILL sell,'' she writes.

'' It's a business problem to solve, and it involved chocolate chip cookies.''

With this back story established, she returns to her beginnings.

The World Students Society thanks Marisa Meltzer.