Full-bodied.
Delightfully quirky debut describes one couple’s quest for the palest rosé in all of France.
The author and wife Tanya are British Francophiles, escaping their hectic London life every chance they get for a week across the Channel. They are also great devotees of rosé, that in-between pinkish wine that has long been considered the stepchild of reds and whites. Their loves came together one summer when, while sipping a deliciously pale rosé at a French vineyard, Jamie, Tanya and their traveling buddy Peter found themselves chatting with the vintner, who insisted there was no paler rosé in all of France. It was a dare, of course: Could this trio of wine connoisseurs find a paler sample of their favorite wine? So began a months-long tour through France in search of the mythical rosé. The trip got off to an auspicious start; in Paris, they met a charming and loquacious restaurateur who suggested vineyards they should visit and winemakers they should meet. The search took them to Champagne, the Jura and Bordeaux. They visited quaint markets, small-town dances and, of course, countless vineyards. Ivey plots his story well: The quest, which sometimes seems hopeless, unfolds with just the right soupçon of suspense. The author sought the holy grail of pale rosé, but he was also after knowledge. He wanted to know how wine is made; why most French folks have always sneeringly dismissed rosé; and why, despite its second-class status, it is becoming trendy in certain circles. Of course, the vinous adventures sometimes took on a metaphorical quality, as when an enigmatic stranger in a bar, who turned out to be a shrink, told Ivey that “people on a quest only think they know what they’re searching for.” Tanya thought she was looking for permanent relocation to France. The occasional tension between husband and wife over where they should settle lends a certain gravity to this breezy travel memoir.
Full-bodied.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34956-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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