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A review by essjay1
French Spirits: A House, a Village, and a Love Affair in Burgundy by Jeffrey Greene
2.0
I really wanted to like this book because my friend loved it and I was sure that it would improve. Sadly it is not my thing - or perhaps I am just not in the right frame of mind to appreciate it. That happens with books sometimes. Key takeaways: he holds his mother in very high esteem and the American way of doing things is always better than the French way.
This is more of a personal memoir with a lot of pages devoted to wedding preparations (including a bath with his wife - wtf?) and their personal histories than the stories around village life I was expecting.
The small snippets of history are interesting but overall the tone was too self congratulatory for my taste. The author even muses that perhaps they should have been more respectful toward the locals and their way of life than they have been, but then seems to lose interest in this line of thought and return to telling us how clever they have been.
This is more of a personal memoir with a lot of pages devoted to wedding preparations (including a bath with his wife - wtf?) and their personal histories than the stories around village life I was expecting.
The small snippets of history are interesting but overall the tone was too self congratulatory for my taste. The author even muses that perhaps they should have been more respectful toward the locals and their way of life than they have been, but then seems to lose interest in this line of thought and return to telling us how clever they have been.