oook blog

Adam Gopnik's writing

...is almost always a delight and full of surprises. In a recent New Yorker piece, a review of a wine book, there's this:

"...some absorbing storytelling, in a form now familiar from ten years of little-thing big-thing books: take a micro-history of something or other (cod, salt, the color mauve) and turn it into a macro-history of something else that provides, in parable, a mega-history of some larger third thing...
...His virtues were limited: he was a very ordinary writer with few pretensions to the grace notes of French, or even English, wine-writing. What he brought to the table was what Americans always bring: encyclopedic ambitions and a universal numbering system."