A charming homage to upscale travel through Italy.
Italy satiates a couple’s wanderlust.
Since her bestselling book Under the Tuscan Sun appeared in 1996, poet, novelist, and travel writer Mayes (Women in Sunlight, 2018, etc.) has been testifying to the glories of Italy, a country, she writes in her latest celebration, that offers “an endless surprise.” For a year and a half, she and her husband took to the road in search of towns, food, and landscapes exemplary of the nation’s rich gifts, joined for part of the trip by their teenage grandson, who was able to find information on the internet and shares his grandparents’ tastes. Although Mayes writes that “the most vivid pleasures of Italy are often the simple ones,” the hotels, restaurants, and shops that enchant her require a travel budget that points to a particular demographic: sophisticated, well-heeled tourists who share the author’s delight in restaurants with “crisp table linens, good cutlery and crystal, understated flowers,” a stool for her handbag, and solicitous wait staff. Throughout their journey, the travelers seek out the gustatory pleasures of regional wines, cheeses, and prosciutto, staying in well-appointed rooms in elegant hotels with picturesque views, where they can sip prosecco on verdant terraces or in a town’s lovely peach and ochre piazza. Days are spent browsing (and buying) in “curated shopping streets,” taking walks around a lake, reading at poolside, and visiting museums, castles, and churches. Mayes has arranged her memoir geographically from north to south, rather than chronologically, to allow readers to peruse the sections randomly, perhaps using the book as a companion guide to their own trip. Her descriptions are painterly and alluring, and she includes recipes for memorable dishes—grilled prawns with fennel and olives, sea bream poached in special seasoned broth, lemon ricotta tart, gnocchi with wild hare, and crispy octopus—that are likely to whet the prospective traveler’s appetite.
A charming homage to upscale travel through Italy.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49769-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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