Genial, offbeat feature writing from the AP correspondent who observed The Secret Life of the Seine (1994) from his own houseboat; now he's got five acres in Provence overgrown with olive trees, and he's smitten with the cult of the olive. The magic, surprisingly, can be catching. A fully engaged curiosity enhances the reach of Rosenblum's repertoire, from the turf of the cultivators to the politics of commerce—and from Kalamata, where he samples some of the best oil of his life (though there's no place on earth like the olive souk in Marrakesh), to California, where olive trees are moving in on the vineyards. Wherever he goes on assignment, Rosenblum finds ``brothers in the olive,'' ready to take up the great debate on the best way to press oil. With a little stroking, they might offer a visiting aficionado a taste from their own stock: ``Gold,'' one connoisseur calls the bottle he parts with reluctantly (it crashes to the floor unsampled during Rosenblum's bag check at the airport). The assaults of nature and the uncertainty of the marketplace, fodder for kibitzers all around the Mediterranean, mean that most members of the olive-growing fraternity have to have day jobs. (Private holdings have anyhow been diluted below subsistence level over the millennia by cumulative adherence to the tradition of dividing a man's olive trees among his surviving sons.) In Italy, bulk-buyers misrepresent superior oils from elsewhere as their own and compound the fraud by adulterating them; in Israel, memorably, a Jew and an Arab go into business together exporting olives in fitting response to the accelerating peace; in Croatia, where nobody's tending the trees these days, refugee children play war games using the abandoned olives for ammunition. The world as seen through the window of an idiosyncratic passion, rendered by a raffish pro. (line drawings)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-86547-503-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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