The Wine Lover's Daughter A Memoir Author:Anne Fadiman In The Wine Lover?s Daughter, Anne Fadiman examines?with all her characteristic wit and feeling?her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine. — An appreciation of wine?along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of West... more »ern literature?was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman?s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. The Wine Lover?s Daughter traces the arc of a man?s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.
Wine is the spine of this touching memoir; the life and character of Fadiman?s father, along with her relationship with him and her own less ardent relationship with wine, are the flesh. The Wine Lover?s Daughter is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.« less