by Marco Pasanella ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2011
Though he removes much of the romance from the idea of opening a wine store, Pasanella’s clear-eyed memoir is a joy to read...
An absorbing look at establishing and managing a wine shop through many difficulties, including the financial downturn.
Pasanella (Living in Style without Losing Your Mind, 2000) chronicles his adventures owning and operating a wine shop in a historic New York City waterfront building. His goal was to create a store that was “informed, but relaxed,” and his memoir showcases the same characteristics. Full of informative tidbits about wine, it never comes across as pretentious; the book is completely accessible to those new to the vast world of wine, yet entertains equally well for the seasoned expert. Pasanella also reveals the inner workings of a wine shop, complete with eccentric wine reps and the politics of distribution. He focuses on every aspect of running his store, from run-ins with the State Liquor Authority to more mundane yet equally interesting elements of any small business, such as dealing with a difficult employee. Eventually Pasanella was able to rise above the everyday aspects of his business and embark on an entirely new venture: selling his own, store-brand wine. This adds another layer to the engaging, lucid narrative. The author wanders off on the occasional tangent, but most of the asides are worthwhile, and Pasanella quickly pulls the story back to the main thread, his wine-selling adventures. The recipes interspersed throughout the book, while appetizing, mostly serve to interrupt an otherwise delightful reading experience.
Though he removes much of the romance from the idea of opening a wine store, Pasanella’s clear-eyed memoir is a joy to read from beginning to end.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-71984-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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