Napa at Last Light, James Conaway
Napa at Last Light, James Conaway
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Napa at Last Light
America’s Eden in an Age of Calamity

Author: James Conaway

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 10 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/06/2018


Synopsis

Not so long ago, wine was an exclusively European product. Now it is thoroughly American; emblematic of Napa Valley, an area idealized as the epicenter of great wines and foods and a cultural tourist destination. But the romanticized accounts you find about it and its denizens is not what you’ll encounter in James Conaway’s candid book.

Napa at Last Light exposes the often shadowy side of the latter days of Napa Valley—marked by complex personal relationships, immense profits, passionate beliefs, and sometimes desperate struggles to prevail. In the balance hang fortunes and personal relationships made through hard work and, in too many cases, manipulation of laws, people, and institutions.

Napans who grew up trusting in the beneficence of the “vintner” class now confront in the twenty-first century multinational corporations and their allies who have stealthily subsumed the old family landmarks and abandoned the once glorious conviction that agriculture is the highest and best use of the land. Inherent in that conviction is the sanctity of the place, threatened now by a relentless drive for profits at the expense of land, water, and even life.

About James Conaway

James Conaway, a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, is the author of more than twelve books, including Napa at Last Light and the New York Times bestseller, Napa: The Story of an American Eden. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Harper's, the New Republic, Gourmet, Smithsonian, and National Geographic Traveler. He divides his time between Washington, DC, and California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill

By Bill Marsano. James Conaway bids fair to be called the Boswell of Napa Valley, biographer-historian not only of Napa as one of the world’s great vineyards but of the people and powers who revere or rule it and, he greatly fears, will one day ruin it. Conaway began what must now be called his Napa......more

Written by a Napa insider who somehow writes from Virginia, Conaway is the embodiment of Napa, where big money, Citizens' United, and the wine lifestyle have transformed a beautiful valley into something the violates the reasons that it exists: farming. Outsiders are defining the inside of Eden, at......more

Goodreads review by Kenneth

I live in Napa, so I want to know what's happening in the wine world, because we depend on the ecomomy it creats for our area's well being. The dirt dug up in this read is a bit startling. The infighting among wine people and the ravish plundering of the mom and pop wineries by the large conglomerate......more