A book that could have been an eye-opener, but the miles become wearisome. Better off staying home with a nice bottle of...
The self-proclaimed booze journalist chronicles his 15,000-mile cross-country journey in search of wine knowledge.
This was no aimless ramble. Former Playboy nightlife columnist Dunn (Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour, 2011, etc.) was on a quest to gather information for his keynote talk at the Pebble Beach Food & Wine Festival, the “annual high-net-worth Northern California bacchanal…where the 1 percent of the 1 percent gather every year to sip ridiculously rarified wine and swap stories about how you can’t get a good yacht crew these days.” Following the death of his brother and a breakup with his girlfriend, the author decided he needed a change of scenery, so he set off to “free [him]self of the gorgeously fucked-up bubble that is Los Angeles” and travel to wineries around the country. The concept is solid: visit unexpected winemaking regions and learn from the vintners. Dunn effectively shines a light on unusual spots in many states that readers may not associate with wine production. But between his stories about the wineries, Dunn force-feeds readers stories of his turbulent childhood, his drunken escapades, his adolescent feelings about women and sex, and his dislike of hipsters. The author seems to understand how his persona comes off on the page: upon arrival at a North Carolina winery, he writes, “I chewed on a piece of straw for added effect because I also dabble in being a dick.” Dunn is an experienced columnist who has a wide knowledge of alcoholic beverages, and at times, when he drops the snarky attitude, this expertise peeks through—but not often enough. Throughout the narrative, the author sprinkles tips and tidbits about wine and its consumption—e.g., tasting terms, wine production basics, or how to become a master sommelier. Some are worthwhile, but many, marred by Dunn’s sophomoric humor, are not.
A book that could have been an eye-opener, but the miles become wearisome. Better off staying home with a nice bottle of wine.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239464-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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