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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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