An audacious manifesto that restores the broken bond between culture and agriculture and finds vital inspiration for...
Like Joni Mitchell with “Woodstock,” sommelier and award-winning film director Nossiter (Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters, 2010) suggests that it’s time “to get back to the garden,” to an Eden that was lost to consumerism.
The author’s 2004 film Mondovino, a documentary on the world of wine that would continue to influence both his subject matter and his process, represented something of a turning point for him. He discovered that “spontaneous fermentation is possible,” for both wine and film, if one follows the best impulses that refuse to cater to the marketplace and the sort of additives—chemicals for wine, celebrity and commerce for filmmakers—that can deaden radical inspiration. This is a sequel of sorts to his previous book, and it reinforces the impression that sometimes a glass of wine is more than a glass of wine. As Nossiter rails against “the agro-cultural homogenization of branded wines,” he draws parallels with the culture at large, and film in particular. Where the likes of Fellini and Cassavetes once followed their own muses, modern filmmakers more often submit to the will of consumer society, becoming an accessory to the powers that be rather than an adversary. Ultimately, artists become nothing more than brands. Film critics, like wine journalists, are equally culpable, reinforcing standards that further rob the art of its vitality. Nossiter finds the natural wine movement filled with those who had pursued their passion in the arts (literary, dance, film, etc.) before finding that wine could both express and satisfy the artistic impulse. In reclaiming the value of the authentic and the sincere, terms trashed by critics and academics, the author also attacks “the coked-up contortions of Martin Scorsese’s self-consciously frenetic movement.” Even when Nossiter’s arguments don’t completely convince, his writing is always provocative and entertaining.
An audacious manifesto that restores the broken bond between culture and agriculture and finds vital inspiration for contemporary filmmaking in the natural wine movement.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-826-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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