A riveting, albeit sugar-coated, account punctuated with ingenuity, family feuds, tragedy, and spellbinding success.
In this intriguing novel based on the life of Ernest Gallo, Richardson tracks the rise of the billionaire Californian winemaker.
When Ernest Gallo was young, his Aunt Tillie gave him a tarot card reading which predicted that he would become “a very successful businessman…[in] the oil business…or the wine business.” The young Ernest could not possibly perceive the alarming accuracy of his aunt’s prediction or the arduous journey ahead of him. One of three brothers, Ernest was born in 1909 in Jackson, California, into a humble Italian immigrant family. In the early 1920s, his parents settled in Modesto, purchasing arable land where they would plant and cultivate a vineyard and sell their grapes. Ernest found himself at constant loggerheads with his father, a deeply stubborn man, whose violent temper would later have tragic consequences. The novel charts the evolution of Ernest’s business brain, from his wily negotiations with unsavory market traders to becoming one of the world’s biggest wine producers. Richardson animates the Gallo’s ascendance with realistic, well-paced dialogue as in this warning from a neighbor: “A winery? Now? Boys, it’s the Dirty Thirties. You’ll end up worse than yer old man. Take my advice: Don’t do it. Stick to what you know.” Richardson portrays Gallo as an avuncular, approachable businessman, a stark contrast to “the 5-foot-4-inch terror of his industry,” as described by Forbes. She also glosses over his unpleasant standoff with the United Farmworkers Union in the 1970s, which gained him the reputation of being a bully. Richardson’s novel is part of The Mentoris Project, a series of books that aims to promote the successes of great Italians and Italian-Americans. This, to a degree, explains the author’s propensity to overlook Gallo’s less admirable characteristics. Nevertheless, the novel remains a charming, tenderly written tribute to Gallo and his remarkable achievements, which will certainly be of great interest to wine buffs, particularly those keen to discover more about the history of the American industry.
A riveting, albeit sugar-coated, account punctuated with ingenuity, family feuds, tragedy, and spellbinding success.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947431-01-0
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Barbera Foundation, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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