Parks, a lively English novelist (Goodness, 1991, etc.), plunges us into the passionate but genial world of his Italian neighbors on the Via Colombare in a village south of Verona. Be warned: to enjoy Peter Mayle's books on Provence, you need never have been there, while Parks draws you so intimately into life with his bubbling but blinkered and edgy Italians that some hands-on experience with Italy would help for full enjoyment of his pages. Parks and his pregnant wife, Rita, in minor peril from their first day, enter their new apartment and are attacked by a shouting madwoman who claims that the apartment was built for her by its late tenant. The Veronese summer stifles life until the first midnight breeze (which carries mosquitos with it into the bedroom), and the hunting dog Vega—kept ever outdoors in the backyard—howls and scrabbles the whole night through. Every night. Parks describes life at the pasticcerça and what drinks one may drink during various hours of the day without being sneered at as a village idiot. On the Via Colombare, peasant life meets urban, and one's gardening smarts are open to deep derision or mild approval. Buildings must be earthquake-proof, with ceramic-on-concrete floors that carry the sound of a dropped coin or a toilet flush in the night like an act of terrorism ringing everywhere. So it goes—and, after ten years, Parks is still there. Always zestful, sometimes gripping—but perhaps mostly for those who remember winter chestnuts toasting over a coal brazier. Much verve.
Pub Date: July 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1531-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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