Once more, who knew ... perhaps attending private Catholic schools for the last 10 years of my education kept me from being exposed to the history and tenets of the Latter Day Saints, but, I mean, I did take comparative religions -- even if taught by a Jesuit.
Devil's Gate is subtitled "The Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy." Apparently in a mid-19th century cost cutting measure, Brigham Young decided his new recruits, coming basically from the British Isles and Scandinavia, ought to drag or push their measly 17 pounds of belongs using hand carts when traveling from Iowa to Utah instead of going in a covered wagon caravan. The tragedy entails two outings that started out too late in the year and encountered blizzards in the final days of the journey, long after the food had been rationed down to less than a half a pound of flour a day. Hundreds died; others "lost their faith" or either turned back or stayed at frontier outposts.
Like The Monster of Florence, the tragedy of the Devil's Gate was not the starvation and inclement weather, but the crime devolving from the rigidity and negligence of the elders of the Church.
The book is tedious and written in a dry, un-engaging style. If anyone is still interested, read from page 284 on, the last chapter and a half. All the revisionist versus "real" history is recapped (very redundantly) in the last 50 pages. I marked a couple of passages to quote, but now think better on it. Essentially, the author is searching to understand why the travelers put up with the suffering for the greater goodness of God's will. It is not a sympathetic description of the religion, its founders and followers, or the motivation of the principal and minor characters. It is interesting to see how deep the roots of blind adherence to religious fanatics eventfully plays out in the contemporary scandals of child abuse through forced marriages.
Nor is there a good sense of the importance of place ... unless that "place" is not Salt Lake City, but the eternal reward of heaven.
Since I have a stack of Western States books, I started The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I can reaffirm that no matter how depressing the topic, a skillful writer can make the reading fly by ... I cannot say that about Utah.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
A "Vacation" Abroad
Over the past week, I unexpectedly was away from work, out of State, with time on my hands, so headed for Barnes and Noble and other airport book sellers. Two books transported me to South America and Europe, well off the beaten path of our 50 States.
Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)
Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.
I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.
Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.
An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.
I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.
Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)
Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.
I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.
Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.
An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.
I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Picked Up a Hitchhiker
It's been over a month since I posted any State review for the Slackers, but after I read The Women, T. C. Boyle sort of hitched a ride along my route, and like Bobbie Magee and Janis Joplin, he lured me into his storyteller world. Since he took me to three States, I am tempted to add them as better alternatives to the current picks, if everyone wants to be a Boyle junkie like me. (Coincidentally, my "face to face" book club read Water Music at my recommendation for June, but since that is about Africa, I won't go that far afield. Except to say, that Boyle's humor, erudition and style has given me my theme for the 2010 version of the Slackers: picaresque novels.)
Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.
Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.
Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.
If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.
And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.
And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.
Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.
Boyle's World's End is a much better book to represent New York than Falling Man. Set along the mid-Hudson River, from the time of the Dutch patroons to 1968, this book, above all others I have read so far as part of this year of traveling across America, gives the best sense of place as origin and source of identity. All the characters could not be who they are but for living here. That is a major theme of the novel: that when family and regional histories are lost, and the current generation becomes clueless and misguided, they are doomed to repeat the fatal behaviors of previous generations.
Boyle relates the history of two families, the Van Brunts, the tenant farmers, and the Van Worts, the landowners, and their encounters across generations with the indigenous Kitchawank Indians. Like his characters sometimes recognize, there is something terribly familiar to their tales, including a list of supporting characters whose names read like my mother's garden club membership list. Here too I recognize the crazy socialists in the Catskills in the '40s, the folk singer inspired replica ship to clean up the river, and the affectations and causes of the hippies. But like Walter Van Brunt, the main modern "hero," there are many historical riches in the book that I never knew or readily forgot if I had ever read it on those ubiquitous blue and gold historical place markers along the byways of NYS.
Like Water Music, Boyle engages his readers with a writing style that builds upon all of an English major's required courses. In the first three pages, there are sentences that evoke the alliteration and rhythm of Beowulf and his characters and themes echo Fenimore Cooper.
If I wasn't so resolved to keep All the King's Men as my pick for the great American novel, World's End would be my selection and I hope I am not selecting it chauvinistically.
And then Boyle routed me to Michigan, on The Road to Wellville. This book is more like our Kansas selection, where place equals opportunity and a setting in which to reinvent one's self. I happened to be simultaneously reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for f-t-f book club and it is pretty easy to see Kellogg in Battle Creek as the first huckster of equating food to health. He is another Charlatan, nominally more sociably acceptable, but a quack with dangerous experiments inflicted on his spa residents. The story evokes a time in America where a city was identified by its major industry, and all sorts of opportunists and con men convened to make their fortune and dupe their consumers.
And from there, Boyle brought me back to California, to Riven Rock, and introduced me to another bastion of American commerce, the McCormick family, generation post-reaper invention. Here the place (Riven Rock is the name of the family's west coast hideaway for insane offspring) is strangely reminiscent of Taliesin in its isolation and self-sufficiency. The story is not quintessentially Californian, as the main characters are transplants, and Stanley McCormick has no link to reality, let alone place. It is also similar to Wellville in that it depicts visually a life style of the then-rich and famous and the extent to which they relocated in search of cures.
Perhaps four books by Boyle set in as many States are too concentrated; however, taken together, they do present a broader perspective -- written in a common voice -- of America indelibly stamping itself on her citizens.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Revisiting a Path Not Taken: Winterthur is Delaware to Me
As I read this book, I had to search my brain to recall exactly when, and more frighteningly, how I got to Winterthur. I have reconstructed my memories to be it was when I was either a junior or senior in high school, clearly before I learned to drive or had a reason for heading south. So how and why did I visit? I've decided I must have gone with my mother, by touring bus, sponsored by our town's art and historical society that her garden club was affiliated with. The museum and the gardens wiped out all recollection of traveling. It is a magical place into which you are dropped, back in time and beauty. It marked me indelibly, so much so that when I was unsuccessful when compared to my other collegemates (that is, I was not engaged and without a good prospect), I applied to the University of Delaware to pursue a Masters degree in Americana there. I got in, but I never went.
Winterthur was with me during college, though, directing my ventures off campus to the American Wing at the Met, staring for hours at huge pieces of furniture, baffled and wondering how I could ever become an expert in this arena and acutely aware that the golden ring of curatorship often depended on family wealth and class connections, other recognized personal deficit.
Henry F DuPont was an extremely shy, almost asocial child, much more interested in lilies of the valley than in the blossoming of members of the opposite sex. His distance and preoccupation with land and buildings affects his relationship with his family, Ruth Lord being his younger daughter. Her memories of her family seem as displaced as my failure to remember how I came to be in Delaware.
Here, Slackers, we have a book where not only does the principal character create his own place, but by doing so, creates his own legacy. If you love Winterthur, you cannot dislike DuPont, however aloof and isolated his life. Henry relates to his surroundings primitively: through color, scent and space; he is so conventionally awkward, never learning to spell or drive, he perhaps was dyslexic. To paraphrase Lord in her afterthoughts chapter: her father's inheritance of unlimited amount of money was coupled with his capacity to use it creatively; his innate gifts were an unparalleled visual memory, an eye for color, a remarkable sense of proportion, an untiring talent for detail; a restless drive and touch of genius that impelled him to create his masterworks.
Showing up unexpectedly in this story is the influence of Isabella Stewart Gardner (my G biography from last year) being used as the model for establishing the structure for financing the maintenance and upkeep of the museum.
I liked this quiet book, a book to be read in a park full of flowers in early spring.
Winterthur was with me during college, though, directing my ventures off campus to the American Wing at the Met, staring for hours at huge pieces of furniture, baffled and wondering how I could ever become an expert in this arena and acutely aware that the golden ring of curatorship often depended on family wealth and class connections, other recognized personal deficit.
Henry F DuPont was an extremely shy, almost asocial child, much more interested in lilies of the valley than in the blossoming of members of the opposite sex. His distance and preoccupation with land and buildings affects his relationship with his family, Ruth Lord being his younger daughter. Her memories of her family seem as displaced as my failure to remember how I came to be in Delaware.
Here, Slackers, we have a book where not only does the principal character create his own place, but by doing so, creates his own legacy. If you love Winterthur, you cannot dislike DuPont, however aloof and isolated his life. Henry relates to his surroundings primitively: through color, scent and space; he is so conventionally awkward, never learning to spell or drive, he perhaps was dyslexic. To paraphrase Lord in her afterthoughts chapter: her father's inheritance of unlimited amount of money was coupled with his capacity to use it creatively; his innate gifts were an unparalleled visual memory, an eye for color, a remarkable sense of proportion, an untiring talent for detail; a restless drive and touch of genius that impelled him to create his masterworks.
Showing up unexpectedly in this story is the influence of Isabella Stewart Gardner (my G biography from last year) being used as the model for establishing the structure for financing the maintenance and upkeep of the museum.
I liked this quiet book, a book to be read in a park full of flowers in early spring.
Taking out "SC" -- More Gone Than You Want
Okay folks, Ella Minnow Pea is what is know as an lipogrammatic epistolary novel. All you English majors out there recall Pamela and Clarissa and probably hoped you would never have to open another volume with such a dated, forced style of writing. Developing a plot through letters, with only one-way dialogue, was a short lived, immature genre, becoming the subject of parody almost as soon as it became popular.
Playwright Mark Dunn, in this his first novel, has overlaid this story using the correspondence format with another layer of device, constraining his selection of words as the story advances by eliminating letter by letter until he is forced to write phonetically and in strained synonyms, with no ability to easily move across time by varying verb tenses.
Okay, none of the Slackers is now interested in reading this book; besides there is absolutely nothing about South Carolina in it, except that it is set on a fictional, independent island off the coast of Charleston. But it does strangely seem relevant as the world begins tweeting and dropping letters left and right. It also makes me remember all those horrible exercises Mercy Groupie had to do for her writers' class. I thought about writing this in Dunn's style, Dear Slackers, but if you carefully read through this review, you will find that the first three lost letters appear nowhere in this review. (Had to reread it and use a couple of synonyms myself.)
Playwright Mark Dunn, in this his first novel, has overlaid this story using the correspondence format with another layer of device, constraining his selection of words as the story advances by eliminating letter by letter until he is forced to write phonetically and in strained synonyms, with no ability to easily move across time by varying verb tenses.
Okay, none of the Slackers is now interested in reading this book; besides there is absolutely nothing about South Carolina in it, except that it is set on a fictional, independent island off the coast of Charleston. But it does strangely seem relevant as the world begins tweeting and dropping letters left and right. It also makes me remember all those horrible exercises Mercy Groupie had to do for her writers' class. I thought about writing this in Dunn's style, Dear Slackers, but if you carefully read through this review, you will find that the first three lost letters appear nowhere in this review. (Had to reread it and use a couple of synonyms myself.)
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Place: Where You Can Be Yourself versus Where You Go to Grow -- Crazy Horse and Custer
Like several of the books in our tour of the States, Stephen Ambrose uses the device of parallel lives to trace the eventual encounter of Crazy Horse and George Armstrong Custer. A blurb on the back cover summarizes Ambrose's differentiation of the two characters: "Custer was never satisfied with where he was. He always aimed to go on to the next higher station in his society. He was always in a state of becoming. Crazy Horse accepted the situation he found himself in and aimed only to be a brave warrior ... He was in a state of being ..." Ambrose uses these men to personify the predominant traits of their people and time, and the inevitable misunderstanding and clash of cultures.
For most of the book, I ran with that premise, until I noticed the word "where" ... our quest to discover the influence of place on personality and story. Both men moved almost perpetually, and the book is hardly limited to Montana. Custer made his moves as career moves, seeing the Plains as his next theater in which to become a national star and potential Presidential candidate. He used his hometown roots to enhance his standing by marrying the most sought after girl in town. He used West Point as yet another credential, and parlayed those connections for plum assignments during and after the Civil War. His usage was almost abusive, pushing social barriers and academic and military discipline. His movement blasted through perceived confinements and rules.
Crazy Horse knew no State boundaries, only the geography of camp sites and the length his horse could travel. He did not manipulate his place/tribe and compatriots. His motivation was the advancement of his people not personal aggrandizement. His travels were often escapes into solitude and reflection.
And so, Ambrose paints two cultures which could not understand or tolerate each other's values, heritage or sense of the future.
Less explicitly, Ambrose uses the transcontinental railroad as a deus ex machina, the real cause of the Army establishing forts and squashing Indian buffalo hunts and free migration across the Plains. The railroad becomes the metaphor for "becoming" ... becoming an industrial power, an avenue for personal reconstruction and profit. It is also the weapon that decimates the herds and hunting grounds, essentially cutting off the Sioux' main trait.
I found the book slow going and scholasti and it does not present a picture of Montana in its geographical uniqueness. Rather it emphasizes two different plot lines common to all character development and good writing: the tragedy of accepting a doomed place and lot and the hubris of marking your ground to write history.
For most of the book, I ran with that premise, until I noticed the word "where" ... our quest to discover the influence of place on personality and story. Both men moved almost perpetually, and the book is hardly limited to Montana. Custer made his moves as career moves, seeing the Plains as his next theater in which to become a national star and potential Presidential candidate. He used his hometown roots to enhance his standing by marrying the most sought after girl in town. He used West Point as yet another credential, and parlayed those connections for plum assignments during and after the Civil War. His usage was almost abusive, pushing social barriers and academic and military discipline. His movement blasted through perceived confinements and rules.
Crazy Horse knew no State boundaries, only the geography of camp sites and the length his horse could travel. He did not manipulate his place/tribe and compatriots. His motivation was the advancement of his people not personal aggrandizement. His travels were often escapes into solitude and reflection.
And so, Ambrose paints two cultures which could not understand or tolerate each other's values, heritage or sense of the future.
Less explicitly, Ambrose uses the transcontinental railroad as a deus ex machina, the real cause of the Army establishing forts and squashing Indian buffalo hunts and free migration across the Plains. The railroad becomes the metaphor for "becoming" ... becoming an industrial power, an avenue for personal reconstruction and profit. It is also the weapon that decimates the herds and hunting grounds, essentially cutting off the Sioux' main trait.
I found the book slow going and scholasti and it does not present a picture of Montana in its geographical uniqueness. Rather it emphasizes two different plot lines common to all character development and good writing: the tragedy of accepting a doomed place and lot and the hubris of marking your ground to write history.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
In Vino Non Veritas: The Billionaire's Vinegar
If this is our blog trip to Virginia, we are sorely DWI.
Wallace's book chronicles a twenty-plus year scam of auctioning bogus bottles of rare wine, the only connection with Virginia being that several of them were purported to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson before he left Paris for Monticello at the beginning of the French Revolution. The suspect wine adulterater is Hardy Rodenstock, nee Meinhard Gorke, who from the 1980's through just two years ago when a default judgment was rendered against him in a case brought by Bill Koch for fraud, led a high life of a French chateau and vintage snob.
Although there are brief historical references to Jefferson and the Monticello Foundation, the book is basically set in Germany and England, where Rodenstock throws his over the top wine tastings and where Christie's auction house is complicit in the sale of old bottles sorely lacking provenance.
I found the story very reminiscent of charlatan John Brinkley The last few paragraphs of the story emphasize the willing suspension of belief when someone wants something bad enough: "As with all successful cons, the marks and the grifter had been collaborators. One sold the illusion that the others were desperate to buy." With wine rather than goat gonads, the commodity seems so much more tempting. But the bidders are not buying something to drink, not even making an investment ... they are buying an image, paying outrageous dues to enter into a most select club, where their names become as famous as the vineyard that produces the coveted nectar.
In another sense, the book was like a longer version of Wine Spectator magazine, dispensing insights and nuances into viniculture. I will never taste the Bordeaux that is written about; in fact, I am probably a drinker of plonk. But the book does seduce you to blow your allowance on a bottle of Chateaux d'Yquem if only to see if Rodenstock's description of it is honest or just another part of his salesmanship: "... in a bottle of d'Yquem, the entire act of making love occurs, lust for life and depravity, melancholy and lightheartedness, poison and antidote."
Satisfying another one of my penchants, Vinegar contained six degrees of separation surprises: with Bill Buckley showing up endorsing a particular connoisseur and the Ten Broeck Mansion appearing as a source of an old cellar full of prime collectible vintages.
If Vinegar is a pit stop on our blog road trip, and we ended up in the French wine aisle of the store rather than the one showcasing scuppernong, we had a chance to drink heartily and think on Jefferson as one of the first to tip America's preference from beer to wine.
Wallace's book chronicles a twenty-plus year scam of auctioning bogus bottles of rare wine, the only connection with Virginia being that several of them were purported to have been ordered by Thomas Jefferson before he left Paris for Monticello at the beginning of the French Revolution. The suspect wine adulterater is Hardy Rodenstock, nee Meinhard Gorke, who from the 1980's through just two years ago when a default judgment was rendered against him in a case brought by Bill Koch for fraud, led a high life of a French chateau and vintage snob.
Although there are brief historical references to Jefferson and the Monticello Foundation, the book is basically set in Germany and England, where Rodenstock throws his over the top wine tastings and where Christie's auction house is complicit in the sale of old bottles sorely lacking provenance.
I found the story very reminiscent of charlatan John Brinkley The last few paragraphs of the story emphasize the willing suspension of belief when someone wants something bad enough: "As with all successful cons, the marks and the grifter had been collaborators. One sold the illusion that the others were desperate to buy." With wine rather than goat gonads, the commodity seems so much more tempting. But the bidders are not buying something to drink, not even making an investment ... they are buying an image, paying outrageous dues to enter into a most select club, where their names become as famous as the vineyard that produces the coveted nectar.
In another sense, the book was like a longer version of Wine Spectator magazine, dispensing insights and nuances into viniculture. I will never taste the Bordeaux that is written about; in fact, I am probably a drinker of plonk. But the book does seduce you to blow your allowance on a bottle of Chateaux d'Yquem if only to see if Rodenstock's description of it is honest or just another part of his salesmanship: "... in a bottle of d'Yquem, the entire act of making love occurs, lust for life and depravity, melancholy and lightheartedness, poison and antidote."
Satisfying another one of my penchants, Vinegar contained six degrees of separation surprises: with Bill Buckley showing up endorsing a particular connoisseur and the Ten Broeck Mansion appearing as a source of an old cellar full of prime collectible vintages.
If Vinegar is a pit stop on our blog road trip, and we ended up in the French wine aisle of the store rather than the one showcasing scuppernong, we had a chance to drink heartily and think on Jefferson as one of the first to tip America's preference from beer to wine.
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