Though he removes much of the romance from the idea of opening a wine store, Pasanella’s clear-eyed memoir is a joy to read...
An absorbing look at establishing and managing a wine shop through many difficulties, including the financial downturn.
Pasanella (Living in Style without Losing Your Mind, 2000) chronicles his adventures owning and operating a wine shop in a historic New York City waterfront building. His goal was to create a store that was “informed, but relaxed,” and his memoir showcases the same characteristics. Full of informative tidbits about wine, it never comes across as pretentious; the book is completely accessible to those new to the vast world of wine, yet entertains equally well for the seasoned expert. Pasanella also reveals the inner workings of a wine shop, complete with eccentric wine reps and the politics of distribution. He focuses on every aspect of running his store, from run-ins with the State Liquor Authority to more mundane yet equally interesting elements of any small business, such as dealing with a difficult employee. Eventually Pasanella was able to rise above the everyday aspects of his business and embark on an entirely new venture: selling his own, store-brand wine. This adds another layer to the engaging, lucid narrative. The author wanders off on the occasional tangent, but most of the asides are worthwhile, and Pasanella quickly pulls the story back to the main thread, his wine-selling adventures. The recipes interspersed throughout the book, while appetizing, mostly serve to interrupt an otherwise delightful reading experience.
Though he removes much of the romance from the idea of opening a wine store, Pasanella’s clear-eyed memoir is a joy to read from beginning to end.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-71984-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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