From a global cast of winemakers come intimate, revealing comments about their art, which swing between invigorating to mellow.
Three years, 50 people and a dozen countries later, Mullen returns with these insights into why folks involved with the wine trade are in love with their work. The reasons are legion but all of a part: being outdoors and in tune with the seasons, entering into a partnership with the grapes, pride in the art of creation and an independence of spirit; as one Slovenian winemaker said, “When we started we have opinions that are different than other guys.” What Mullen has delivered is essentially a transcript of the spoken word, as unvarnished as are many of these mostly unsung winemakers—there are plenty of abrupt transitions and digressions—an enjoyable collection that contains many a rough diamond who yet ably convey the passion they bring to their work. “I like drinking red wine. I like making red wine. I like thinking about red wine.” Mullen keeps the proceedings lively by covering not only lots of ground—New Zealand to Missouri, Washington to the Azores—but also lots of aspects of winemaking, from cooperage to corks, the challenging demands placed on women winemakers, research into screwcaps, the talents of the garagiste, winery architecture. Particularly impressive is a short course on Italian geology that blossoms into an earnest and enlightening dissection of the whole notion of terroir, as well as a wonderfully disarming story of a Frenchman who now makes cognac, but who came to the calling via Kent in England, where he worked at “a small winery in the town of Chiddingstone for a bit more than two years. That’s where I learned to make wine.” That is an admission perhaps unique in the long annals of winemaking. Included are photographs heavily saturated with atmosphere, the kind you can almost smell before you see them. A fine, maverick company of winemakers hold court about the thing they love best: communing with the world of the grape.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9849565-0-0
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Roundwood Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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