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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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