Personable and keen-minded.
A wide-ranging journalist/author takes to the oenophile road.
“Is there anything better than drinking?” Osborne (The Poisoned Embrace, 1993, etc.) asks. “When the happiness of drinking overwhelms you, you cannot resist it.” But Osborne felt terribly self-conscious about drinking wine, wondering whether his choices were the promptings of others or the authentic response of his tongue to something good. Wanting to feel comfortable with his likes and dislikes, to breathe free of the floodtide of wine opinion, off he went to California, France, and Italy to educate himself. That meant, in measure, coming to know himself, as well as something about what the winemaker was after. He had to dig into the notions of taste and the realities of terroir, into hugeness versus finesse, into the usable nuggets of prejudiced wisdom from the wine police threshed from the ego and dross. By temperament, Osborne is drawn to the stranger byways and backrooms of winemaking; he’s not about to pass up a sampling from Angelo Gaja or lunch with Robert Mondavi (though both had him sweating his self-confidence), but he’s happier in the company of California garagiste Bill Cadman, a man of “dark forces, mistakes, passions, and truculent convictions,” or bad-boy alchemist Randall Grahm. Like Kermit Lynch and Simon Loftus, Osborne is looking for a connection between grape, place, and himself, a trifecta that, with growing exposure to ideas, intentions, and product, he hits more often than he would at the racetrack. His prose has a pleasing, gentle flow, with eddies of humor and yeastiness; Osborne displays a hungry mind, and a gift for taking in the landscape even if he dislikes the wine: “a distant field of mustard switching off for the night,” or “cypresses stabbing into the dark blue air . . . silhouettes of umbrella pines along the hills.” He takes the showboats down a peg, but he isn’t a self-conscious iconoclast, just an odd fellow looking for a mouthful of happiness.
Personable and keen-minded.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-86547-633-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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