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THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER

Name: THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER
Author: Anne Fadiman
ISBN: 978-0-374-22808-8

A MEMOIR

by Anne Fadiman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017

Reading this daughter's graceful, often melodious billet-doux to her father is not unlike imbibing several equally...

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Fadiman (At Large and at Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist, 2008, etc.) decants a harmonious blend of biography, wine lore, and memoir in this account of a literary daughter's relationship with her celebrated literary father.

Born into a secular Jewish family in Brooklyn, Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999) spent his adult life submerging that identity beneath WASP sensibilities and pursuits. His belief that Jewishness was a cultural and career impediment and his envy of WASP privilege were powerful motivators to escape his origins, in the 1930s and beyond. As revealed by his daughter, Fadiman's was almost entirely a life of the mind. Physically clumsy, he was unacquainted with much of life beyond its gustatory or literary pleasures. Though thwarted in his desire to become an academic, he emerged as a self-invented, ardent public intellectual of the first rank. Before the age of 30, he had served as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster and head of the book review section at the New Yorker. His friends and colleagues were a who’s who of celebrated litterateurs of the time, and the gleam of a life in letters was not lost on his daughter. Despite considerable renown, the refined yet self-effacing Fadiman always regarded himself as an outsider and, in darker moments, even an impostor. The author's mother, by contrast, was of mixed Presbyterian and Mormon stock, an accomplished journalist and screenwriter who relinquished her career to marriage. Anne Fadiman, writer-in-residence at Yale and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, grew up in a prosperous, secular, decidedly rational household. Always there were books and a civilizing force embodied by wine, a taste for which she did not share. In limning her father, Fadiman also lays a gradual accretion of detail about herself, but she is careful never to eclipse his (regrettably) diminished star.

Reading this daughter's graceful, often melodious billet-doux to her father is not unlike imbibing several equally felicitous glasses of wine, their salutary effects leaving one pleasantly sated.

Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-374-22808-8

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 23, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2003
edited by Anne Fadiman

- BOOK REVIEW
EX LIBRIS
by Anne Fadiman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN
by Anne Fadiman

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)