A fast-paced read with nuggets of wine trivia that will appeal to anyone who has struggled to understand their parents.
A prickly young journalist reconnects with her father, a hot-tempered oenophile, on a wine trip through France.
Borel and her father, Philippe, have always had a rocky relationship. Philippe is a former chef and hotelier, and throughout Borel's youth, the family lived in hotels across the world. They finally settled in Quebec City, where Borel was involved in a fatal car accident. Though she was not at fault, the guilt of the other person's death still haunts her. Her father's response—or, in her opinion, lack thereof—plagues her too. Yet her love for her mysterious father, who shares her own bizarre brand of dark humor, transcends any lingering adolescent wounds, and the two embarked in a tiny car to meander through the French countryside. Throughout the trip, Borel grapples with two issues: her lack of wine “sense”—she could not even tell when a bottle was corked—and her father's looming mortality. Borel deftly captures the confusing emotions that surround parent-child relationships, especially the need for comfort and understanding that competes with a desire to rebel and establish one's own identity. Yet the author's gift for portraying that psychological whirlwind also causes the book to feel scattered at times. As she spirals through her existential crisis, the structure of the narrative flounders into semi-articulate emotional rants and only regains footing once she and her father are back on the road. Philippe's voice is so disarmingly charming and funny, however, that he assuages any sense of confusion on the part of the reader, and Borel, after these sidesteps. It is easy to understand the author's desire to bond with him.
A fast-paced read with nuggets of wine trivia that will appeal to anyone who has struggled to understand their parents.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-40950-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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