Exudes the supercilious attitude of a high-end sommelier who deigns to dispense superior wine wisdom.
A purveyor of fine wines offers his thoughts on the correct way to get the best reds and whites from Europe’s cellars to New York’s sellers.
Rosenthal demands exclusivity, no filtration and full fidelity—and he indicts those who fail to meet these requirements. Like a realtor, he declares that the most important consideration is location: Terroir, where the grape lives, is of the essence when it comes to concupiscible vintages. Having no interest in wines of the New World, the author has always concentrated on the small family vignerons of Italy and France. He recounts pleasant meetings leading to palate-delighting discoveries with the local cognoscenti, growers, rascals and rogues in the fellowship of the vine. Tastings engender lavish descriptions. Forget simple “nose” or “legs”; his wares merit greater eloquence. Rosenthal depicts one vintage that, when properly mature, is “of stunning complexity with aromas that recall summer’s most pungent and sweet flowers and herbs, accompanied by notes reminiscent of well-worn saddle leather and animal fur; the flavors are of licorice and burnt cherry and chocolate and tobacco [with] the almost tangible feel of a light coating of mineral-infused dust.” What serious oenophile can resist such evocative and romantic appellations: Chambave Rouge from the Valle d’Aosta, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano Riserva, Hattenheimer Nussbrunnen Trockenbeerenauslese? Connoisseurs of a particularly highfalutin bent will no doubt savor this celebration of the vintner’s art; the hoi polloi may prefer Sergio Esposito’s more accessible expressions of enthusiasm in Passion on the Vine (2008).
Exudes the supercilious attitude of a high-end sommelier who deigns to dispense superior wine wisdom.Pub Date: May 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-24856-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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