A Tale of Two Valleys : Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma
Author: Alan Deutschman
List Price: $23.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0767907035
Publisher: Broadway (08 April, 2003)
Sales Rank: 64,767
Average Customer Rating: 3.47 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 3 out of 5
Reverse Snobbery
In paragraph after paragraph, Deutschman lauds the people of Sonoma, whom he sees as "reg'lar folks," while excoriating people from Napa, most San Franciscans, and anybody who stops at a winery for wine tasting. This is reverse snobbery at its worst. I quickly tired of Deutschman's pronouncements of who's a phony, and who's pretentious. Napa and Sonoma have plenty to offer, Alan. Leave your sophomoric value judgements out of it, especially when you revel in being a guest at a rich out-of-towner's weekend retreat in Sonoma.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Reportorial carelessness
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 out of 5
Stick to the magazine articles, Alan.
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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