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Title: A Tale of Two Valleys : Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma by Alan Deutschman ISBN: 0-7679-0703-5 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 08 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.47 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: amusing look behind the scenes
Comment: Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times called this book enjoyably wry and amusing and compared it to a young Tom Wolfe, and she's got a point. The book is light and entertaining, a compelling fast read filled with colorful characters. There's the man who spends $500,000 on a single bottle of wine, and the vintner with a barnful of vintage Porsches, Ferraris, and Bentleys on his Napa "farm," and the community activists who fight so that dozens of chickens can wander freely through the town square in Sonoma. The book gives an eye-opening insider's look at the wine country and shows what visitors rarely see when they come for a day of wine tasting or a weekend getaway at an inn or resort. The tone is humorous and bemused but the book also raises real issues about growth and development and direct democracy and how can we try to preserve the natural beauty and character of a place as more people flock to live there and threaten to ruin it.
Rating: 1
Summary: Reportorial carelessness
Comment: What do a breezy writing style, an eye for quirky detail, and reportorial carelessness add up to? In the case of Alan Deutschman, it's this slender book--an often entertaining but appallingly unreliable take on contemporary lifestyles in the wine country north of San Francisco. If you catch a reporter in one god-awful factual lapse, it does make you suspicious of everything else he says, doesn't it? Page 50, where Deutschman casually "disses" two of the Sonoma Valley's historical heroes, was where I "caught" this errant reporter.
Mariano G. Vallejo was no "robber baron," but the founder of Sonoma and for many years its highly respected patriarch. He was also an important winemaker. And Agoston (not "Auguston") Haraszthy was neither a sham aristocrat nor a "rogue," but a genuine Hungarian nobleman-turned-pioneer viticulturist whose herculean labors in the 1850's and 1860's did much to put California on the wine map of the world. Haraszthy was sometimes called "Count," never "Baron." For more than a century, he was universally revered as the "Father of California Viticulture," though some scholars now argue that the title exaggerates his importance. In any case, he was fully exonerated by judge and jury of the spurious charges of embezzling gold from the San Francisco mint that Deutschman now lays at his door.
These facts are not hidden or secret. If Deutschman had cracked my own book, Strong Wine: The Life and Legend of Agoston Haraszthy (Stanford University Press, 1998), he would have learned enough about both Vallejo and Haraszthy to get his facts straight.
Rating: 1
Summary: Stick to the magazine articles, Alan.
Comment: I suggest a new subtitle: "Wine, Wealth, and Enough Filler to Stretch a Feature Article into a Book Deal"
This book could be summer reading for a 5th grader, but if you've read Napa or East of Eden, you probably have higher expectations for the proffered subject matter. A Tale of Two Valleys will leave you wanting (particularly a refund).
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Title: The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley by James Conaway ISBN: 0618067396 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 24 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: Napa: The Story of an American Eden by James Conaway ISBN: 0618257985 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 24 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Wine People by Stephen Brook ISBN: 0865652481 Publisher: Vendome Pr Pub. Date: 01 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: The Food Lover's Companion to the Napa Valley: Where to Eat, Cook, and Shop in the Wine Country Plus 50 Irresistible Recipes by Lori Lyn Narlock, Thomas Keller, Michael Carabetta ISBN: 0811836193 Publisher: Chronicle Books Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Napa Valley: The Land, the Wine, the People by Charles O'Rear ISBN: 1580083226 Publisher: Ten Speed Press Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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