A story steeped in passion for tea lovers, dreamers and seekers of a meaningful life.
Muzyka’s journey from tea cart operator to owner of a multimillion-dollar tea business.
As carefully crafted as the handpicked teas she describes, the author’s aptly named book offers wisdom with each cup, a “touchstone of tranquility, of warmth and nourishment.” Each chapter begins with a discussion of a tea blend related to her story, which begins when Muzyka’s son was born with a life-threatening kidney defect that required surgery. The single mother needed a way to earn money for the hospital bills. A lover of tea and student of aromatherapy and herbs, she looked to her Roma ancestors, medicine women who were healers and herbalists, for guidance. In an upscale consignment shop, she offered her concoctions—Gypsy Love rose tea, Vanilla Rose tea latte, Hazelnut Cinnamon black tea latte—on a cart she called the Gypsy Tearoom. Next came Zhena’s Gypsy Tea company, featuring her line of teas created with all the senses in mind: colorful and attractive to the eye, a perfect balance of fragrances, loose leaves to touch, flavors to “dance on the tongue” and a story to tell. Business, she learned, had its own complex layers to understand. She forged ahead with plans to use organic, fair-trade teas even with the inherent economic challenges, and she built a strong relationship with a tea plantation in Haputale, Sri Lanka, that shared her philosophy. Muzyka provides life lessons at the end of each chapter gleaned from what she learned along the way. Ultimately, this sensuous read captures the romance and pleasure of tea. Consider, for example, Coconut Chai, “a blend of sumptuously ripened coconut, thick and balmy Galle Valley black tea, sweet cinnamon, the bold heat of Burmese ginger, mellow nutmeg, prized imperial cardamom, piquant red peppercorns, and tongue tingling clove.” Who could resist?
A story steeped in passion for tea lovers, dreamers and seekers of a meaningful life.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5960-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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