A delightful celebration of an extraordinary Italian family’s enduring love affair with wine.
The Antinori family has been producing wine in Tuscany since 1385. Gracefully capitalizing on his family’s story, winemaker Antinori chronicles the unique business and personal relationships of this remarkable family enterprise.
The author uses seven wines as the foundation for his narrative, pairing each with a topic related to the family business. Beginning with a Franciacorta Brut rosé, Antinori explains how this wine represents his three daughters and their role in creating the future and “modern international soul of Marchesi Antinori.” The author explores becoming a winemaker (Villa Antinori); growing a company style (Solaia); reinventing wine (Tignanello); the regions of Umbria and Tuscany (Cervaro Della Sala); making wines in the world (Antica Napa Valley); and opening a winery (Mezzo Braccio Monteloro). Throughout the book, Antinori stresses that family relationships are the basis of the company’s enduring success and style. “The legacy and continuity that we are selling,” he writes, “my signature on the label, our roots: these things mean that even when times are tough, I wouldn’t dream of letting the company out of our control.” The author began exploring California and its wines in 1966 when he visited Napa, and his company’s first California wine, a cabernet sauvignon, was harvested in 2004. Today, the company “owns 1,742 hectares planted with vineyards in Italy, and 2,358 hectares around the world,” including Kyrgyzstan. The author’s impressive business success and personal life, combined with the compelling world of wine production, provides plenty of delectable fodder for readers. Whether Antinori is explaining the wine crisis of the 1960s or defining the Tuscan way of doing things or how his family roots infused him with a love of travel, the result is a pleasure. Oenophiles and those just curious for a bit more information will appreciate the technical notes about each of the seven bottles.
A delightful celebration of an extraordinary Italian family’s enduring love affair with wine.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4388-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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