How the wine industry came to cater to a very particular Nosy Parker.
Who has not favored a bottle of wine because of its numerical score? Chances are, wine and spirits writer McCoy reminds us, that the grade was set by Parker, Le Pape du Vin, reputed to be gifted with the best nose in the business. A wine critic autodidact, Parker started his life in oenology at home in a Washington, D.C., suburb with the mimeographed Wine Advocate, a break from his day job as a corporate attorney. Soon his sharp advocacy spread beyond the beltway. He hired a printer, quit practicing law, added a tasting room to his home and sampled 10,000 wines each year. As the affluent boomer lads of Wall Street became hooked, Parker matured as autocrat of fermented juices. He authored bestselling texts on varietals. Naturally, as his influence increased, he faced critics and competitors, lawsuits and even death threats. As Parker grew stout, vintners learned to produce the kind of drink he liked. Robust French reds designed to secure his 90 nod filled the barrels, as well as the spit receptacles at ubiquitous blind tastings. The producers grumbled, but they liked the francs the Americans provided. Parker, now entitled to wear the rosette of the Legion of Honor, remains the recognized grandee of wine criticism, offering, he insists, truth in beverage. Some see him as the bully of the vineyard. McCoy knows Parker and she knows the tetchy wine business as well. She’s familiar with the arcane, often fey language and the nasty hostilities of oenology. She is, finally, ambivalent about Parker’s certitude and influence. To some readers, it may seem a lot about a little hedonism; maybe a whiff of the otiose with the oak. But for wine enthusiasts and grape groupies, her text offers something quite juicy.
A straightforward bio of Le Grand Bob, and a glimpse into the world of cool cellars and fretful sellers.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-009368-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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