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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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