A book that could have been an eye-opener, but the miles become wearisome. Better off staying home with a nice bottle of...
The self-proclaimed booze journalist chronicles his 15,000-mile cross-country journey in search of wine knowledge.
This was no aimless ramble. Former Playboy nightlife columnist Dunn (Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour, 2011, etc.) was on a quest to gather information for his keynote talk at the Pebble Beach Food & Wine Festival, the “annual high-net-worth Northern California bacchanal…where the 1 percent of the 1 percent gather every year to sip ridiculously rarified wine and swap stories about how you can’t get a good yacht crew these days.” Following the death of his brother and a breakup with his girlfriend, the author decided he needed a change of scenery, so he set off to “free [him]self of the gorgeously fucked-up bubble that is Los Angeles” and travel to wineries around the country. The concept is solid: visit unexpected winemaking regions and learn from the vintners. Dunn effectively shines a light on unusual spots in many states that readers may not associate with wine production. But between his stories about the wineries, Dunn force-feeds readers stories of his turbulent childhood, his drunken escapades, his adolescent feelings about women and sex, and his dislike of hipsters. The author seems to understand how his persona comes off on the page: upon arrival at a North Carolina winery, he writes, “I chewed on a piece of straw for added effect because I also dabble in being a dick.” Dunn is an experienced columnist who has a wide knowledge of alcoholic beverages, and at times, when he drops the snarky attitude, this expertise peeks through—but not often enough. Throughout the narrative, the author sprinkles tips and tidbits about wine and its consumption—e.g., tasting terms, wine production basics, or how to become a master sommelier. Some are worthwhile, but many, marred by Dunn’s sophomoric humor, are not.
A book that could have been an eye-opener, but the miles become wearisome. Better off staying home with a nice bottle of wine.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239464-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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