An inspiring, captivating story of resilience.
A memoir from the youngest certified sommelier in the male-dominated wine industry.
After her passionate response to the final question of the competition, James (Drink Pink: A Celebration of Rosé, 2017) won the Sud de France Sommelier Challenge in 2013, becoming the first American female sommelier to take home the title. Soon after, at the age of 21, she became the youngest certified sommelier. Getting to that point was not an easy task. Along the way, she endured a tumultuous upbringing due to an absent mother and an alcoholic father as well as verbal and sexual abuse from customers. Growing up, James felt “that one’s social class did not define one’s character” and had the notion that she could “bring people together through wine” as a sommelier. Becoming a certified sommelier should have been a life-changing event, but she soon discovered it was not. Despite her successes, she was continually belittled for her age and faced sexism and abuse of power from employers and clients. After years of humiliation in the high-end restaurant world, where men hold the majority of the power, James became disillusioned and escaped to the vineyards of France, seeking authenticity. There, she also discovered a true sense of purpose. On her return to the States, with the support of her family, she felt “empowered to make a change.” She established a zero-tolerance policy at the restaurant she now co-owns, and, with a vision for “diversifying the wine world,” she created Wine Empowered, a nonprofit organization that offers tuition-free education for minorities and women in the hospitality industry. She also finished her book, which shares this journey and dispels many of the myths associated with the wine industry. Many of the details James shares about her experiences are disturbing and graphic in nature; however, her story also exudes warmth as she breezily weaves in her knowledge and passion for wine and shares the generous love she has for her siblings, friends, and husband.
An inspiring, captivating story of resilience.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296167-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
