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TO HAVE AND HAVE ANOTHER

A HEMINGWAY COCKTAIL COMPANION

An interesting read and a must-have for Hemingway lovers and craft bartenders.

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. 1, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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