Feiring’s lively account is a good place to begin for wine lovers seeking a head start on exploring a vastly...
Award-winning wine writer Feiring (Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally, 2011, etc.) offers a peek into the Republic of Georgia’s relatively little-known wine culture.
Georgia, a small country bordering the Black Sea, boasts 525 indigenous grapes, 8,000 vintages, and the “longest unbroken winemaking history.” In 2011, the author poured a glass of “amber colored wine with some tannic scratch” for the wine director of famed New York City restaurant Le Bernardin. Though he was underwhelmed, Feiring was impressed by the wine’s unusual character. Soon after, she participated in a conference on natural wines in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. Feiring was seduced by the country, its colors and flavors, and the unusual method of creating wine in large clay pots called qvevri. “Whether or not there was a genetic or spiritual link, Georgia, in the shadows of the Caucasus Mountains, burrowed under my skin,” she writes. The author began championing the wine and the Georgian winemakers’ efforts at retaining their traditional methods against the chemicals, commercialization, and standardization so prevalent in numerous wine regions around the globe. She weaves in a brief overview of the country’s turbulent history under communist rule and its deleterious effects on its wine industry. “It was then,” she writes, “that everything crystallized for me: communism under the Russians and modern-day capitalism were twins separated at birth. Neither fostered or celebrated the individual.” Feiring also discovered that Georgians don’t just eat; they feast with gusto. She describes her experiences with long, rowdy repasts complete with multiple toasts, and she includes Georgian recipes such as Ajarian Chirbuli, a breakfast dish featuring eggs, walnuts, and hot chilies, and Lamb Chakapuli, a slow-cooked stew eaten by Stalin. Throughout, the author chronicles her explorations into Georgia’s varied wine regions.
Feiring’s lively account is a good place to begin for wine lovers seeking a head start on exploring a vastly underappreciated wine-producing country.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1612347646
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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