Vividly descriptive, but lacks a coherent structure and context.
Novelist and world traveler St. Aubin de Terán (Otto, 2006, etc.) provides a series of maze-like musings on her work in Mozambique.
After a financially devastating divorce, the author dove headlong into a new life of filmmaking and charity work. Upon meeting her current husband, a former news cameraman, St. Aubin de Terán was introduced to the beguiling shores and poverty-stricken people of Mozambique. It was here that she decided to focus her energies, initially planning a documentary but ultimately founding a college of tourism for the people of the Mossuril District. The book chronicles her work there, giving insight into the land and lives of a people on the far edge of Africa. With colorful, lively language, the author eloquently describes the Mozambicans’ attitudes toward everything from cell phones to mangrove trees, conveying a palpable sense of their culture and lifestyle. But like the tangled roots of the mangroves the author so lushly describes, her narrative threatens to trap and confuse the reader in its convolutions. She often begins a chapter discussing one topic and then moves into a seemingly unrelated, or at least decidedly tangential, discussion. In “If Not Now, When?” she predictably recounts the events leading up to her decision to start her charity. By the end of the chapter, however, she wanders off into a lengthy discourse on cooking and food supplies. Because she moves rather aimlessly among various topics, providing little overarching framework or organization, it is difficult to figure out exactly how she got where she did and why. Her stream-of-consciousness style, while perhaps just as meandering and structureless as the sense of time she describes in Mozambique, often leads into knotted thickets of self-reflection.
Vividly descriptive, but lacks a coherent structure and context.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84408-300-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Virago/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
Though the Gallos' wines might repulse you and their reputation give you the willies, their autobiography is worth a look, if only to get another side of the picture. Without too much pain, the brothers Gallo (with Henderson, And The Sea Will Tell, not reviewed) get past their aw-shucks-work- hard-and-get-anywhere drapery to their nuts-and-bolts shtick: control and marketing (with a nod to hard work, like 120-hour weeks and an annual six months on the road). Marketing: Gallo wine is where it is today—the number-one seller in America—because the brothers got their goods into the hands of savvy distributors, folks who got the wine at eye-level in supermarkets across the land and fused Bartles & James wine coolers into the national retina via television. Control: Need a decent glass supplier? Build a glassworks. Having competition trouble? Slash your prices and crush the buggers. Certain problems are tactfully ignored, like those surrounding Thunderbird, a Gallo-produced down-and-outer's wine rumored to have been marketed by strewing the bottles along skid rows to give the fortified concoction a high profile. Other problems are glossed over: The Gallos' controversial (some might say fascistic) treatment of labor is couched in terms of conflicts between unions (the Teamsters vs. the United Farm Workers). But there is a wealth of background material: family travails, like the murder/suicide of the brothers' parents; Depression days when they sold bulk lots of grapes at railroad sidings; the formation of trade organizations; Julio's obituary for his son Phillip, another suicide, which is enough to break your heart; children spurning the family business; and a vision of Gallo in the 21st century. Whether or not you buy into this version of the Gallo story, it's a family saga with all the makings of a television miniseries: adversity, intrigue, tragedy, manipulation, greed, and a slick presentation. (60 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2454-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Just another fascinating day in paradise.
Having spent five years managing the tiny island of Highborne Cay, Exuma, in the Bahamas the author paints a vivid, heartfelt and surprising picture of Caribbean life.
To say that there’s never a dull moment on Highborne Cay–where Albury and her husband have left their comfortable, big-city life in Nassau to work 12 to 14 hour days in a place reachable only by seaplane or boat–is a vast understatement. In the first 50 pages, armed robbers terrorize this native Bahamian couple, a guest nearly chops off his fingers in a fish-cleaning accident and a woman docks at the marina with her husband’s dead body aboard her boat. If not for its highly specific details, this exotic memoir easily could be mistaken for fiction. The author moves us swiftly through her unusual world, scattering photos of the island and its inhabitants throughout the book, lending a personal touch. What’s not shown in pictures is deftly illustrated in words. Albury introduces wonderfully drawn characters like Rosie–“a real island gal” in “skimpy shorts” who “always stepped out of her seaplane in bare feet with her brown, curly hair askew”–adding life to the narrative. Some passages border on the poetic, as when the author rhapsodizes about how “blue hues, mixed with the orange of a new morning, reflected on the ocean’s surface in whatever mood it happened to be in that particular day.” While a boatful of stranded Haitians and an illiterate employee lend this white author’s memoir a racial overtone, to her credit she doesn’t flinch from the uncomfortable truth of the Caribbean’s inequality and desperate poverty. From watching a Sperm whale being devoured by tiger sharks to staying on the alert for drug runners, Albury reveals that island life is less a breeze than a whirlwind.
Just another fascinating day in paradise.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2009
ISBN: 12.50
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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