A charming homage to upscale travel through Italy.
Italy satiates a couple’s wanderlust.
Since her bestselling book Under the Tuscan Sun appeared in 1996, poet, novelist, and travel writer Mayes (Women in Sunlight, 2018, etc.) has been testifying to the glories of Italy, a country, she writes in her latest celebration, that offers “an endless surprise.” For a year and a half, she and her husband took to the road in search of towns, food, and landscapes exemplary of the nation’s rich gifts, joined for part of the trip by their teenage grandson, who was able to find information on the internet and shares his grandparents’ tastes. Although Mayes writes that “the most vivid pleasures of Italy are often the simple ones,” the hotels, restaurants, and shops that enchant her require a travel budget that points to a particular demographic: sophisticated, well-heeled tourists who share the author’s delight in restaurants with “crisp table linens, good cutlery and crystal, understated flowers,” a stool for her handbag, and solicitous wait staff. Throughout their journey, the travelers seek out the gustatory pleasures of regional wines, cheeses, and prosciutto, staying in well-appointed rooms in elegant hotels with picturesque views, where they can sip prosecco on verdant terraces or in a town’s lovely peach and ochre piazza. Days are spent browsing (and buying) in “curated shopping streets,” taking walks around a lake, reading at poolside, and visiting museums, castles, and churches. Mayes has arranged her memoir geographically from north to south, rather than chronologically, to allow readers to peruse the sections randomly, perhaps using the book as a companion guide to their own trip. Her descriptions are painterly and alluring, and she includes recipes for memorable dishes—grilled prawns with fennel and olives, sea bream poached in special seasoned broth, lemon ricotta tart, gnocchi with wild hare, and crispy octopus—that are likely to whet the prospective traveler’s appetite.
A charming homage to upscale travel through Italy.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49769-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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