A book for gourmands and vinologists, for lovers of Shakespeare and Mozart and art and architecture, for those who, like the...
An art scholar spends a year in Rome, living on the eponymous square, researching and writing a book, sampling the gastronomic and vinous bounties of the city, feeling lonely, enriching his Italian.
Barkan finished his book, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, but it’s hard to see how if he cooked and ate and drank and socialized and viewed works of art and listened to Mozart as frequently as these pages record. What a busy man! And what a supremely educated man, as well. Allusions are as thick in his prose as, oh, chunks of tomato (fresh, of course) in a good pasta sauce. Yet nothing seems forced. If he sees aspects of The Merchant of Venice or Don Giovanni in all he is doing at the time, well, that’s because these works are not exterior to him; they form part of his remarkably complex interior. Barkan’s memoir is loosely chronological, but within each segment, he moves freely about in time, sometimes many years, sometimes merely moments. He writes easily about Henry James and Hawthorne, Roman history and architecture and art; he and a new friend can, impetuously, plop down and play a four-hand piece by Schubert; he can hide salmon caviar inside an artichoke; he can expatiate about the concept of ekphrasis (writing about visual objects) and the delicacies of French wine. There are passages about food preparation, about crushes on other men (he admires a friend’s “bulge” in his skimpy Speedo as they share space in an ancient bath), and, always, about art and aesthetics. He joins an eclectic group of wine-tasters, struggles to make his Italian convey what he knows and thinks and feels, and begins to have epiphanies of various sorts—e.g., food and work and music go together.
A book for gourmands and vinologists, for lovers of Shakespeare and Mozart and art and architecture, for those who, like the author, realize that all is metaphor.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-25405-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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