A Frenchwoman entertainingly reflects on what she learned about herself, her family’s wine business, and wines in general...
How one Frenchwoman’s stint in New York City helped her find her roots.
Dugas’ family has been in the wine business since her great-grandmother cultivated their first vines in Champagne back in the 1930s. “As a girl I watched my mother open a bottle of her family’s champagne at nearly any excuse,” she writes. “A friend stopping by the house? Champagne! The sun coming out after a little rain? Alors! Champagne! But the truth is that I knew almost nothing about it, except that there was plenty in the pantry.” Despite her lack of knowledge, Dugas jumped at the chance to work for her uncle as a wine representative in the United States. She could live in New York City, learn English, and be able to travel America, all while learning about wine. In this delightful memoir, the author recounts her first two years in New York, first working for her uncle, then as a champagne rep for Pringent, and finally as an assistant to a small importer of quality French wines. In the beginning, Dugas struggled to interact with her roommates and business associates while discussing wines in a language that didn’t flow as readily across her tongue as the vintages she poured for her potential clients. But she soaked it all up, the good and the bad, and discovered sheer pleasure in learning as much as possible about each of the wines she represented. She also branched out to experience new wines with a small circle of friends and her boyfriend, who moved from France to New York to be with her. Dugas shows the U.S. from a foreigner’s perspective, which brings an interesting slant to her story. She also includes informative sections on all types of wine in each chapter, providing a minicourse in oenology.
A Frenchwoman entertainingly reflects on what she learned about herself, her family’s wine business, and wines in general while living in the U.S.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88463-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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