A heart-stirring life story.
The first woman ever licensed to distill hard liquor in North Carolina uncorks an emotionally charged memoir about traversing family heartache to become the “moonshine mama” of the South.
In the art of making moonshine, “pure heart” refers to the elusive part of the distillation process when fermenting corn mash begins to yield the best part of “platinum whisky.” It also describes the fierce and unwavering love that Ball, founder and owner of Asheville Distilling Company, demonstrates caring for her wheelchair-bound sons, Marshall and Coulton. Born with severe health issues and prone to near-constant respiratory infections, the boys weren’t expected to live into their teen years. Ball refused to let that happen, and she also found a way to resurrect the entrepreneurial spirit her beloved father instilled in her when she was a girl running her own horse shows in Texas. Determined to give her kids a better chance far away from those dusty confines, however, Ball and her devoted husband, Charlie, packed up the family and moved to Asheville. There, the author, who wrote the book with the assistance of veteran co-author Witter, realized that she and moonshine were a perfect match. Invoking the salesmanship learned at her father’s knee, she valiantly began to construct her new company making her own authentic brew. The business soured fast, however, when Charlie’s real estate ventures tanked, and what began as the author’s quest for identity and self-fulfillment quickly became a desperate mission to save her family from dissolution and ruin. “Even now,” she writes, “I find my resentment bubbling up, not for the bad investment—that was the product of the times—but because my husband didn’t listen [to her business advice].” Teetering between success and failure, Ball was able to create a thriving business through sheer hard work and good sense.
A heart-stirring life story.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245897-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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