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Larousse Gastronomique (Crown; $25). A handsome, one-volume encyclopedia for practical information and good reading...
Wine, like every other form of art and artifice, stands or slumps on manners. These new American vintages are well-trained: they do not speak out of turn. They await parental approval. They are infants. Alexis Lichine, a wine grower shipper and guru (The New Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits), observes that it has taken 20 centuries for the wines of Europe to evolve. Says he: "All it takes is time, trial and a great measure of good luck." To which, in the U.S., might be added patience, faith, curiosity and quite a few dollars...
...Pulitzer-prizewinning novel Andersonville, which depicted the brutalities of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp; of a heart attack; in Sarasota, Fla. Kantor, great-grandson of a Union Army officer, first became intrigued by the Civil War at the age of ten, when he perused a Civil War encyclopedia. The intrigue became an obsession 20 years later as he launched his 42-book career. A stickler for accuracy, he did prodigious research, visiting and revisiting Gettysburg and Andersonville for his Civil War novels and flying eleven combat missions with the British Air Command for his World War II stories...
...passports once a year at a Soviet embassy. But as far as most Russians are concerned, the two are nobodies. Galina's name is nowhere to be found in the Bolshoi Opera's special 200th anniversary commemorative book. Slava's entry in the latest edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia runs a meager twelve lines. The Soviet press continues to ignore his work abroad, in fear, says Slava, that other musicians might be encouraged to leave the country?or at least to demand greater artistic freedom at home...
Traditionalists may argue that the Colorpedia looks and reads like three decades' worth of Sunday supplements. Indeed, the encyclopedia's breathless attention to contemporary figures can lead to endless second-guessing. Why is Joe Namath given ten lines of biography, while only seven are accorded to the late Vladimir Nabokov? Why Walter Cronkite but not David Brinkley? If Capote rates an entry, why not Vidal? Such quibbles will depend on whose Gore is being axed. Still, the book changes browsers into learners. Whatever its flaws, the R.H.E. is a welcome invitation not only to the mind...