A well-rounded, absorbing narrative of entrepreneurship, wine and the extraordinary man who made it all happen.
How a midrange California chardonnay captured the market and transformed the wine industry.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Humes (Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, 2012, etc.) explains how Jess Stonestreet Jackson (1930–2011) became “one of the four hundred richest men in the world,” quoting Jackson's own estimate of his astonishing success as a vintner: “We did in wine what [Starbucks] did in coffee.” The author tells the quintessentially American rags-to-riches story of this remarkable man who worked from the age of 9 and put himself through college and law school and was still working 14-hour days when he died at age 81. Humes describes a man who loved taking risks, but his admiration for his subject does not prevent him from presenting a rounded portrait of this quirky, sometimes-ruthless man, a loving but demanding husband and father who arrogated all decisions to himself. Jackson had an enormous capacity for hard work and a brilliant mind capable of absorbing a massive amount of detail without losing the bigger picture. He began a legal career in 1955, working for the California Highway Department to establish a fair market price for condemned properties. From there, he reversed gears, going into private practice as the representative of developers. He became an expert in assessing real estate and accumulated a considerable fortune from his own investments. Twenty-five years later, he bought a small vineyard as a retirement property. After finally achieving a bumper grape crop, a glut in the California grape market threatened to wipe him out. Rather than give up, he opened a winery, mortgaging his assets in order to expand. Jackson positioned Kendall-Jackson to capture the middle market by mass-producing a quality line of blended wines, and he worked further to become expert in viticulture and in marketing.
A well-rounded, absorbing narrative of entrepreneurship, wine and the extraordinary man who made it all happen.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-285-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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