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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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