This is advice? Why drink mediocre (or worse) wine at all?
A rather unhelpful introduction to wine from Beardsall, a wine professional, that may well leave neophytes with more confusions and doubts than when they started.
Not that this expert doesn't have intelligent things to say about sommeliers and wine-shop clerks, storing wine and types of glasses, and (most important of all) making sure you have fun drinking wine. To this latter end, she affects a breezy, carefree style: “Wines go with everything and there really are no hard and fast rules to worry about.” But then Beardsall will go on to tell you to be careful about salads and asparagus and never drink a dessert wine except for dessert. In fact, she has plenty of rules and opinions, many of which are purely subjective. That’s fine—wine is all about subjectivity—but it underlines the need for experience and further daunts the newcomer. Beardsall’s reading of a wine list is a case in point: “I would be unlikely to order a $72 bottle of Merlot, especially since I don't know the producer.” How does this help the aspiring oenophile? She notes the importance of terroir and producer, but never clearly defines their relative merits. “Whatever the wine from whatever grape or region, what's really important is the human element in the wine-making process,” Beardsall comments at one point; then a few pages later states, “wine-making is not about human intervention, but as I've emphasized throughout, it's about soil and climate.” She chides one reviewer for saying a wine reminded him of red brick, “even though of course, he most likely never tasted brick.” Then she refers to wine as “velvety,” leaving you to wonder if she has been chewing on the curtains. Other peculiar bits of advice include: “If the wine is great, drink it room temperature to coolish. If it's mediocre, or worse, the colder it should be.”
This is advice? Why drink mediocre (or worse) wine at all?Pub Date: July 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3800-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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