Reviews and Comments

this seems like a path to contentment.

Just picked up a copy of this book, after having wanted it for years.

After the first chapter, it’s clear to me that this book is chock full of tips to elevate your mixes to rival any professional production. I’m already taking the author’s advice and running with it. A great pickup.

A nice respite from my usual non-fiction, this small collection had some good short stories and a few decent poems. The second issue of their journal that I've read. Pretty good.

In this age when so much is wrong with the world, Frédéric Gros seeks to convince us that by obeying others we disobey ourselves. Also, that our highest calling is to defend the community that we are a part of, our human community. By undertaking a habit of civil disobedience, we resist injustice. When we speak up for ourselves, we speak up for the whole of humanity.

He references people as diverse as Thoreau and Eichmann, Antigone and Kant, Foucault and la Boétie, finishing with Socrates and Plato. Describing the various ways we justify to ourselves the continuation of our docility, this obeisance to authority which we’ve practiced since childhood, he seeks avenues through which we can finally be true to ourselves.

I’d say he succeeds, if only we’ll take his lesson to heart.

A very entertaining read. I expected more talk of revolution, but instead got vivid descriptions of the scenes and people Ernesto and his friend Alberto, as they made their way from Buenos Aires to Chile and up the west coast of South America and on to Caracas, encountered on their trek. Still, there were seeds planted on that trip and comments of the injustices he saw.

I don't know if the tenor of the text was due to the translation or from his original writing, but it was a great story told in a casual, almost modern day tone. Very contemporary. Highly recommended.

Quite the study of the psyche of the Outsider in our society. The author delves into some of the major characters of modern literature, as well as the temperaments of various artists. I confess that I didn't always grasp what he was trying to communicate (and I hadn't read all of the works he referenced), but I learned a lot nonetheless.

The author looks for traces of the young Ho Chi Minh in Paris, where he'd spent much of his twenties. But the past of the eventual leader of Vietnamese communism seemed largely invisible. Still, the author makes the search interesting. A short read.

This book is chock full of info about winemaking processes, regional laws and classifications, wine tasting and serving etiquette. It also contains a large section detailing the prominent grapes and types of wine grown in each winemaking country. Very recommended.

The only negative from my perspective is that editing could have improved the readability of the text somewhat.