From Publishers Weekly
Only those who love sitting through slides from other people's vacations are likely to warm to Mayes's latest, on the joys of owning a renovated Tuscan villa. Mayes's first book on the subject,
Under the Tuscan Sun, sold two million copies and spawned a Hollywood film, but with each return visit to familiar territory (
Bella Tuscany;
In Tuscany) Mayes finds less fresh material. This work is a grab bag of guess-you-had-to-be-there anecdotes (Mayes devotes an entire paragraph to the activities of a wasp that flies into her study while she's writing) and suggestions for how readers can, as Mayes and her husband, Ed, do, live the good life in northern California and Italy. (Hint: it takes a lot of money.) The book includes 25 recipes, though few are specifically Tuscan. Instead, Mayes devotes space to Nancy Silverton's Italian Plum Tart (Silverton, founder of Los Angeles's Campanile restaurant, has her own villa one valley over) and several recipes of Ed's. The listing of Mayes's own "At Home in Tuscany Collection" of furniture at book's end adds to the coyly self-indulgent feel.
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Mayes'
In Tuscany (2000)
is a glossy coffee-table volume that combines a cookbook, a guidebook, and Mayes' appreciative ruminations about Tuscan culture. With the help of her husband, poet Edward Mayes, she revisits much of the same material, but this title reads more like a lifestyle guide for Italophiles yearning to bring the Tuscan sun into their own homes. The loosely organized chapters focus on home and garden design, food, and entertaining in spreads accompanied by Steven Rothfeld's lavish photographs of villas, fields, and the Mayes' friends enjoying
la dolce vita around the table. Some of Mayes' suggestions, such as her garden tips borrowed from the Medicis, may be out of reach for many readers. And a few recipes use ingredients that are hard to find stateside. But she offers plenty of accessible ideas as well, such as the rich colors and decorative scenes painted on many Tuscan walls. And most readers won't want this for the practical specifics; they'll merely enjoy the vicarious plunge into a relaxed, gracious culture that this, like all of Mayes' titles, offers.
Gillian EngbergCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved