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Let’s get together Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher are the authors of the unpretentious and popular Friday "Tastings" column in The Wall Street Journal. They’re not wine critics, in the traditional sense, but populists, and unofficial cheerleaders for the wine culture. Their new book, Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion: Red, White, and Bubbly to Celebrate the Joy of Living, is full of reader recommendations, anecdotes about first holidays together, restaurants they have dined at and ways to have fun with wine parties including a list of questions to "start the fun," such as "What did Hannibal Lector consider the perfect wine with liver?" Clearly, Gaiter and Brecher are a matter of personal taste (sorry). The book’s chatty tone sometimes verges on the self-congratulatory (gee, we’re famous!), but there is some good information to be gleaned. In fact, the discussion of wine wedding showers and how much wine is needed at a reception might make this a useful gift for the newly engaged.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

A life in art and controversy

by bookpagedev

Food & Drink

Food & Drink

Tips for beginners

Review by bookpagedev

by Eve Zibart

The Eyewitness Companions series of travel guides is rightfully famous for its full-color photos and high-quality paper and for its intriguing details on famous buildings and personalities, but the format doesn’t work quite as smoothly in Wines of the World, which is a slightly ungainly combination of tour brochure and wine primer. At times it strains for prettiness, and its factoids often read like picture captions, but it eventually gets its rhythm. The discussion of tannins and their role in wines is trenchant, the descriptions of key flavors and the explanations of how to read wine labels of various countries is useful. Still, there’s a sort of conundrum: the maps and wine region trails, followed by capsules of dependable labels, would seem to be more help to someone actually on the ground, but the book is best used as a buying guide. And while it includes commendably strong sections on less well-known wine regions in Hungary or Romania, for instance, giving Nelson Mandela credit for sparking the winemaking revolution in South Africa is a bit of a stretch.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

A life in art and controversy

by bookpagedev

Food & Drink

Food & Drink

Hail to the chef

Review by bookpagedev

by Eve Zibart

Master sommelier Andrea Immer, who has consistently sought to make even big-name wine accessible and appealing, is also a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, and this year she has turned both her food and wine expertise to making the end of the day something to look forward to. Everyday Dining With Wine is the ideal hybrid of cookbook and wine guide, combing unintimidating but memorable descriptions of the major wine varieties with equally low-key and rewarding recipes. Immer believes that making dinner should be as much fun for the two or four of you as for company. In fact, some of the most intriguing recipes are the simplest, thanks to her adventurous way with a blender. She turns dried porcini into dustings for foie gras or for tuna with black bean-hoisin sauce; makes edamame (soybeans) into pesto for angel hair pasta and smoked salmon; rolls chicken in oatmeal and sauces it with Gewurtztraminer. This is the book for the cook who has more tastebuds than time. Despite her credentials, Immer is no wine snob. She offers a range of wine pairings for each recipe: an inexpensive “everyday” wine, a moderately priced “once a week” label and the expensive “once a month” choice. As they used to say about wine, Immer just keeps getting better. Eve Zibart is a restaurant reviewer for the Washington Post and author of The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion.

The life of Louisa May Alcott: Truth is stranger than fiction

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Didion’s year of grief

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

After 40 years of marriage, writer Joan Didion did not have a single letter from her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. This was because, with rare exceptions, the pair was together 24 hours a day. They worked together in California hotel rooms on movie scripts or down the hall from one another in their New York apartment on their respective essays and novels. "I could not count the times during an average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him," Didion writes. Returning home alone from the hospital where she has learned Dunne is dead – he collapsed and died as the couple was sitting down to dinner on December 30, 2003 – Didion remembers "thinking that I needed to discuss this with John."

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's slender, intensely personal, deeply moving and stylistically beautiful account of the year following her husband's death. It was a year in which Didion struggled with the belief that she could have and should have done something to prevent her husband's death ("I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."). It was a year in which she was constantly swept into a vortex of memories of the couple's former life. It was a year in which grief came in recursive, paralyzing waves. It was also a year in which the couple's only child, daughter Quintana Roo, was twice in a coma and not expected to live. [Tragically, Quintana died in late August, just weeks before Didion's book was published.]

At the hospital on the night Dunne died, the social worker sent to be with Didion refers to her as "a pretty cool customer." Didion is surely one of the best prose stylists writing today, and her account is almost clinically precise. She is unsparing in her examination of the "derangement" she experienced after her husband's death and during her daughter's illness ("So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries."). But The Year of Magical Thinking is anything but "cool." Instead, the book reverberates with passion and even, occasionally, ironic humor.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," Didion writes. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she offers a powerful, personally revealing description of that place.

Cleopatra, from a different point of view

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Explore the complexities of sight

Review by bookpagedev

by Alison Hood

Neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye is the latest offering from an always eloquent and brilliant observer of the workings of the human brain. As with many of his previous books (among them Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia), this new work explores the dysfunctions of the brain through selected patient case histories, compellingly presented as poignant, inspiring and absorbing stories. The dysfunctions discussed here involve the sense of sight and the complexities of visual perception.

In seven elegant essays—one of which is in the form of Sacks’ personal journal of his cancer diagnosis, subsequent treatment for ocular melanoma and the impairment of his right eye—the author takes us on a journey into “the complex workings of the brain and its astounding ability to adapt and overcome disability.” These disabilities include such intriguing conditions as aphasia (loss of speech and language comprehension), agnosia (the inability to identify objects) and prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize faces). Sacks depicts these and other conditions in human portraits that include the story of Lilian, a concert pianist who can no longer read music, but can still play beautifully by ear; Howard, a “man of letters” and novelist who can no longer read, but painstakingly finds a new way to read and write; and “stereo” Sue, an academic neurobiologist with monocular vision, who gradually gained and self-improved her normal stereoscopic vision.

Sacks’ blended use of story, anecdote and reference to explore fundamental and mysteriously interconnected complexities of human sight, perception and experience works to great effect. But what makes The Mind’s Eye stand tall is his recounting of how humans—and the human brain—can adapt, finding creative and ingenious ways to cope with physical losses and disorders. The final essay on perception, which discusses blindness, visual imagery and memory, direct visual experience and the paradox of the power of language, is breathtaking. From first phrase to final sentence, Dr. Sacks will draw you into a fascinating mental landscape that will leave you in awe of its strange, often spiritual and exquisite pathways.

Neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye is the latest offering from an always eloquent and brilliant observer of the workings of the human brain. As with many of his previous books (among them Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia), this new work explores the dysfunctions of […]

Survival against all odds

by bookpagedev

Social Science

Social Science

America and Europe: finding common ground

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Bishop

Timothy Garton Ash believes that “If we are free, we can work with other free people toward a free world.” He understands that freedom means different things to different people and that democracy is not an end in itself. Instead, it is “a means to higher ends,” ends about which people may disagree. Such an ambitious goal requires the right combination of realism and idealism. Garton Ash is not an out-of-touch thinker. He is Director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. As a historian and writer he is probably best known for his reporting from Eastern Europe and his writings about the fall of Communist regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. In Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, Ash astutely analyzes foreign policy strategies and decisions by the U.S. and Great Britain and various European nations. Despite America’s recent differences with France and Germany, Garton Ash emphasizes that the U.S. and the European Union do agree on basic issues. He considers it folly for E.U. countries to attempt to become superpowers; instead arguing that it is in the world’s best interest to “bring Europe and America as close together as possible. . . . [T]he human race has no chance of making a free world without the combined efforts of its two largest conglomerates of the rich and free.” He even considers Britain and France giving up their individual seats in the U.N. Security Council in favor of a single E.U. seat.

Garton Ash draws on an impressive variety of sources, including history, conversations with world leaders and his own observations from years of work in Europe and the U.S. He is keenly aware that for the first time in history the world has the resources to seriously address world deprivation. The disappearance of natural resources and the environment is our biggest challenge, Garton Ash argues. But freedom is an essential key for people to work together to attack these problems.

Garton Ash believes that political leaders do not have all of the answers (“It is vital that we all appreciate this simple truth about our rulers: half the time they really don’t know what they’re doing”) and he advocates strong citizen action. His passion for and authoritative command of his subject make this a stimulating and inspiring book.

The life of a flawed but brilliant writer

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

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