Review by New York Times Review
"WHEREAS the term adventurer suggests a passion for new frontiers," Alexandra Lapierre observes in the coffee-table book she's written with Christel Mouchard, WOMEN TRAVELERS: A Century of Trailblazing Adventures, 1850-1950 (Flammarion, $45), the term adventuress "connotes ambitiousness, intrigue, mercenary sex." But the authors of six recent travel books - all men - suggest otherwise. These writers and their books traffic in ambitiousness, intrigue and mercenary sex. Could they be adventuresses too? Part quest, part biography, part philosophical essay, MISHIMA'S SWORD: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend (Da Capo, paper, $15.95) is the British martial arts expert Christopher Ross's account of his search for the sword that was used to cut off Yukio Mishima's head after the Japanese writer committed seppuku in 1970. The book has the intensity and mystery of a fever dream, and it's rife with memorable and sometimes unsettling information. We learn that the samurai wore makeup (pallor might be mistaken for cowardice) and that Mishima's suicide remains controversial. (Seppuku is meant to be poetic and conducted in private, but the publicity-friendly Mishima took his life in the office of a Japanese general, and even looked into having it televised.) Ross's quest takes him to a Tokyo S-and-M club, where he interviews a man Mishima seduced into sexual role-playing: as the famous writer and his star-struck charge acted out seppuku, Mishima, without any physical contact, would climax at the point of his "beheading." By interspersing such graphic material with an account of Ross's own childhood interest in kung fu and with more than you want to know about the role of swords in Japanese culture, Ross approaches a larger portrait of the nature of violence, as elucidated by one of his epigraphs, from G.K. Chesterton: "The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men." Complete with two fantasy sequences, "Mishima's Sword" is as strange and beguiling as its subject. A real-estate deal that consists of a handshake and a bottle of Champagne. A "little elf of a man named Enzo who came to oil all the beams" of the house. A "noise-party" to get all the deer off the property. These are but a few of the elements that account for the soufflé-like charm Of A VINEYARD IN TUSCANY: A Wine Lover's Dream (Norton, $24.95), Ferenc Mate's account of renovating an abandoned 13th-century friary in Montalcino - the wine zone whose signature offering is brunello - and turning it into a winery. In her Washington Post review of Mate's earlier work of Eurocozy lit, "The Hills of Tuscany," Nancy McKeon noted that the personalities one encounters "are those of new friends and neighbors, not the hired hands (masons, plumbers and plasterers) of Mayle and Mayes." "A Vineyard in Tuscany" is a combination - we get both Enzo the beam-oiler and a passel of lovable neighbors, some of them famed vintners. But more intriguing are the treasures and terrors lurking deep in the woods of the new property - things that are, by turns, lovely, ancient, creepy and slithery. Although Mate seems more interested in writing about house renovation than winemaking, by book's end most charitable readers will share a feeling of accomplishment and pride when his wife's syrah is voted one of the great Italian reds by Morrell's of New York. The more hardheaded among us may be inclined to ask, "What hath Peter Mayle wrought?" In WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T RUN: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (Lyons Press, paper, $16.95), Peter Allison says most tourists want "to see animals that could kill them, but hopefully wouldn't." Given this fact, and the wealth of terrifying and enterprising animals Allison writes about - including a band of monkeys that break into the tents, "festooning the thorn trees with underwear like it was an early Christmas" - it's a surprise that the African animal I'm most interested in seeing is a genet. This slinky hellion, "a long-bodied relative of the mongoose," has "the markings of a leopard and an exquisite kittenlike face that is almost impossible to dislike." Though it "bordered on illegal" to do so, Allison and his colleagues kept a genet in the lodge at his camp. The creature enjoyed climbing onto the dining room table and nibbling on leftovers; at one point, its ambitions even larger, it ate someone's pet squirrel. Allison, who has spent most of his career at a camp called Mombo, in the Okavango Delta, also tells of unsuspectingly walking almost the full length of a submerged crocodile and driving a jeep full of tourists into a hippo-filled lagoon. Recent literary scholars, trying to determine if there's a male equivalent of chick-lit, have latched onto the gambling writer Ben Mezrich ("Bringing Down the House") and his tales of yuppie men in collective search of ka-ching. But you could just as easily point to the flourishing genre of eat-challenging-or-vile-food books, as practiced by Anthony Bourdain, Steven Rinella and now Tom Parker Bowles. Here is machismo salted with 7,000 pounds of willingness and served in a delicate croute of irony. In THE YEAR OF EATING DANGEROUSLY: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes (St. Martin's, $24.95), Parker Bowles brings to the gross-out formula his outsider status - a self-deprecating Brit, he acknowledges that he's "a half toff." Though he's never afraid of coming off like a nervous Nellie - a harrowing cobra-killing sequence in a Chinese market ends with Parker Bowles running shrieking into the street - he is, on the whole, fairly obsessed with his own masculinity or lack thereof. In overzealous preparation for the National Fiery Foods and Barbeque Show in Albuquerque, which he's told is "the culinary equivalent of running with the bulls," he finds himself soaking his member in ice water after chopping chiles and forgetting to wash his hands. When he eats a smelly dog soup in Seoul, he does his best to avoid vomiting and configures his "arms into strong man pose to show my appreciation of its virile powers." Parker Bowles's gonzo spirit is matched only by that of his publisher. The author bio on the book's jacket begins by identifying him as the "son of Prance Charles's wife, Camilla." In other words, a mama's boy. "The overly sentimental, cautious and commercial tenor of travel writing is satisfying to almost no one beyond the navel gazers who write it and the 'hospitality' advertisers who sponsor it." So says the travel writer and former Maxim features editor Chuck Thompson in the introduction to his new collection, SMILE WHEN YOU'RE LYING: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer (Holt, paper, $15), billed as "a small effort to correct the travel industry's bias against candor and honesty." Anyone who's read anything written under the aegis of the place they're visiting - or the means by which they've been conveyed there - will find Thompson's mandate refreshing, even if a good deal of his own writing seems to have been done with a ball-peen hammer. We hear about the time four charming Thai girls stole all his money on Ko Samet and about his tussle with customs officials in Belarus. But is no-holds-barred travel writing anymore "real" or revelatory than corporate travel writing? When you read something like "One of the best meals I ever had was spent facedown on the bathroom floor of our favorite Indian restaurant" or a description of a Thai prostitute with breasts like "crenelated zeppelins," you have to wonder. But just when you think you're going to buckle from Thompson's surfeit of sneer, he trundles out a good one - "No nationality has a monopoly on, or scarcity of, ugly." In the grammatically challenged patois through which we have come to know him, the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's character Borat Sagdiyev - the man Chuck Thompson wishes he could be - has written a guidebook to Kazakhstan and "to minor nation of U.S. and A." BORAT: Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Doubleday/Flying Dolphin, $24.95) is almost as outrageous as Borat's movie, only less squirm-inducingly so. That said, the many semi-clothed pictures of Borat and various friends, relatives and sex workers make this scabrous and occasionally hilarious book challenging to read in public. The captions don't help. (One for a full-page picture of a shirtless, pantless Borat in a lime green scrotal sling reads, "For protection against sunburning I make rub squirrel cheese on my skins.") Given that the government of Kazakhstan was less than pleased about the movie, it may be Borat's sly intention to get his glorious nation to fire-bomb the book; indeed, each copy of this absolutely filthy item should come with a pair of rubber gloves, if not a Hazmat suit. From libelous assertions ("Some famous homosexuals American men includes Spiderman, Ronald Micdonalds and Madonna") to goofball self-ridicule (Borat was teased as a child "since my moustache was slow and did not appear until I was age of 9"), there's something here to offend everyone, much of it related to "ambitiousness, intrigue, mercenary sex." What Joan Didion once wrote about the California governor's mansion can be said about this book: I have seldom seen anything so evocative of the unspeakable. THE GREAT WALL From Beginning to End. Henry Alford is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and Travel & Leisure.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Máté follows up his earlier best-seller, The Hills of Tuscany (1998), with the tale of how he came to purchase and renovate his own ancient ruin of a Tuscan villa and to produce some extraordinary wines from its vineyards. Although already a Tuscan resident, Máté yearned to find an antique ruin to restore, eventually locating an ancient wreck of a friary for sale. Having sunk much of his worldly goods into its reconstruction, Máté strove to make his improvements architecturally and historically accurate. He discovered that the soils around his new home were unusually suited to the production of wine, so he planted a vineyard despite formidable roadblocks thrown up by Italian bureaucrats. Within a few years, Máté's wines garnered international recognition. That these encomiums should have come to pass is not surprising since Angelo Gaja, Tuscany's most renowned vintner, owns the neighboring acreage. Máté's ear for dialogue, even in translation, makes for amusing reading.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hungarian-Canadian author and sailor M te (The Hills of Tuscany) recounts in wry, candid detail how he rebuilt a Tuscan ruin into a world-class winery. Living in Tuscany with his artist wife and son while savoring the landscape, food and pleasant neighbors wasn't enough for M te, who admits he thrives on adversity. He wanted his own castle and finagles the purchase of a 13th-century friary in Montalcino, with a proper forno (oven), a forest crammed with porcini and 60 acres of land-15 of which he fashions over three hard years of work into a vineyard sprouting robust harvests of Sangiovese, merlot, cabernet sauvignon and Syrah grapes. His diary of sorts regales the reader on the process of restoring the ancient ruin, called La Colombaio: first by detailing how an Etruscan house was constructed, then by observing how the various workmen were hired (and what they ate for lunch). While hacking in the forest, he finds the remains of a 3,000-year-old city, inviting the interest of archeologists. M te breaks from the construction and excavation for treks through the Dolomites before returning to prepare for the toilsome but ultimately satisfying vendemmia (harvest). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From Italian aficionado Mát (Ghost Sea, 2006, etc.), a sun-drenched memoir about the author's obsessive quest to own a winery. The Hungarian-born, Canadian-raised Mát and his family--Candace, his artist-wife, and their young son--were happily ensconced in La Marinaia, a quaint house in the Montepulciano region of Italy, when Mát confessed his plan to try his hand at making wine. First, he needed a vineyard. After comical encounters with Italian landowners and an uncharacteristically efficient realtor, Mát settled on 15 enchanted acres in the Montalcino region, with a crumbling castlelike house, tangled vines, ancient ruins and fertile soil. Prone to winsome refrains, Mát's prose works only in that it resembles an entertaining newspaper column. He was living the dream, the perfect--but attainable--life, and he's relating it for the benefit of the armchair traveler, the wistful wine lover and the ambitious handyman. The best passages focus on the painstaking restoration of the crumbling house (the land had once housed a friary) and the crew of Italian stonemasons and suppliers who worked with him. Readers interested in a succinct lesson on Italian-building techniques--a subject which, in Mát's hands, is oddly infectious--will be especially drawn to those details, and the lessons in viticulture are also interesting. His wife, who possesses a better "nose" than her husband, completed the ambitious, two-year sommelier course in preparation for their first batch of wine. Their son, nicknamed "Buster," also pops up from time to time to provide comic relief. Rich with details of Tuscan life--the flora (wild roses, rosemary, wild porcini mushrooms), the food (a few delectable recipes and a guide to Mát estate wines) and the people--this is a light read with a fairy-tale ending. A formulaic but romantic tale for readers who dream about a charming Under the Tuscan Sun lifestyle. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
