The co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans breathes new life into some of Ernest Hemingway's favorite libations and adds new depth to many of the author’s characters.
Spirits consultant Greene writes that he has “a lifelong appreciation” of Hemingway's works, but he wanted to know more about the epicurean context behind some of the settings and characters. The author features recipes and histories for Hemingway's cocktails, from haze-inducing absinthe to the sour White Lady. He does his best to tell the stories behind the inventors, though he aptly writes, “Heck, show me a timeworn drink with an undisputed lineage and I'll buy you a round.” He follows each recipe with suggested reading: Negronis in chapter six of Across the River and Into the Trees, a Rum Swizzle in chapter 11 of Islands in the Stream. That work also features the “double frozen daiquiri with no sugar,” which “pretty much steals the show in the ‘Cuba’ book of Islands in the Stream.” Popular cocktails, such as the Tom Collins, feature the traditional recipe and Hemingway's variation. Even an obscure cocktail, Physician, Heal Thyself (named by Greene), is included; the recipe was based on a diagram drawn by Hemingway in his medical files. Interspersed between recipes are archival photographs, relevant sidebars and historical facts about Hemingway's friends and bars and the characters based on them, among other intriguing bits.
An interesting read and a must-have for Hemingway lovers and craft bartenders.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-53764-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perigee/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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