The story catches the pioneer feel of the venture: plain, fraught, moments when Hargrave thinks she’s the luckiest person in...
The folksy but original story of bringing into existence Long Island’s first fine winery.
In the heady days of the early 1970s, Hargrave and her husband Alex—after some serious research, though still with a sense of the utopian in the air—bought a potato farm in Cutchogue, on the North Fork, and planted pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, and sauvignon blanc. What follows is the pleasingly unvarnished tale of the operation, from its fixer-upper days to its wines’ successes at international fairs. While there’s no shortage of strange happenings—an employee turns out to be victim of a slave racket; others are nearly hit by a train that intermittently runs through the farm—what gives this tale its passion is precisely its quotidian character, along with Hargrave’s attentiveness to the unfolding of the vineyard, explaining how she became very much a part of the place: “I would stand in the vineyard after work, closely examining the vines’ leaves . . . stroking the vines’ tendrils. They would curl around my finger, responding to my touch.” For every absurd encounter with the BATF, the DEC, or kindred bureaucratic institutions, there’s a night under the harvest moon when she and her husband climb naked into a tank of must to stomp the grapes; for every piece of lousy professional advice—a Cornell professor tries to subvert the entire operation to fulfill his prophecy that it would be a failure—there’s a neighbor willing to offer a hand. The tone is subdued throughout, prideful yet without glee, for as the vineyard gelled, Hargrave and her husband drifted apart. The sting of that, after all the work, is clear.
The story catches the pioneer feel of the venture: plain, fraught, moments when Hargrave thinks she’s the luckiest person in the world, and then the opposing winds—personal, meteorological, economic—that buffet all settlers to new country.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03221-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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