Customer Rating:  
Summary: The Birth of the Champagne Industry
Comment: Details the birth of the champagne industry. I lent to my wife first, and she was able to regale our friends and work folks with anecdotes from this book throughout the holiday season. More a long magazine article then a scholarly work, but the breeziness makes for a quick read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A bio on the creator of my favorite bubbly
Comment: I very much enjoyed "The Widow Cliquot," a biography on the life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, a brave and ambitious woman who built one of the greatest champagne empires in the world. This extremely well-researched book chronicles Barbe-Nicole's life from birth through the untimely death of her husband, through her struggles to succeed at the champagne business, until her death at the ripe old age of 89. This is a great story of an independent woman who was way ahead of her time in many ways. I also learned a lot about the history of champagne, which was very interesting. Overall, this is a great book, especially for all the champagne lovers out there.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good reconstructed bio
Comment: To paraphrase Lincoln, those that like this sort of thing will find plenty here to like. I mean that in both a good and not-so-good way.
"The Widow Clicquot" exists in that delicate world between biography and historical fiction, where gaping holes in the historical record are filled with supposition, educated guesses and intuition based on the few tiny nuggets of info that do survive. Those who are looking for a pure, hard-driving bio are most likely going to be irritated by the extrapolations ("On what basis does she say *that*?! How does she *know*?!"). Fair enough, but having been in the trenches of academic history I'm slightly more forgiving... I know first hand just how difficult it is to reconstruct a life from the past, especially when this life occurred in one of those, er, "dynamic" eras of political, social or economic upheaval when people were less concerned with good record-keeping.
I think those who like reading about unconventional women, innovative entrepreneurs, the history of one of the world's most enjoyable luxuries, or popular history in general will readily forgive the author her many extrapolations and greatly enjoy this book. The good widow Clicquot sounds like the kind of formidable woman you'd love to meet in person (and talk about as soon as she left the room!). Mazzeo's writing is engaging, and she does a good job with filling in gaps of Barbe-Nicole's life-story with info on the history and production of champagne, which the casual reader will most likely find enjoyable and informative without feeling unduly "academic." To a surprising degree, Mazzeo is able to make the good Widow's business ventures suspenseful and riveting, making these sections of the book particularly enjoyable.
Very often, the success of a biography, particularly on a poorly documented subject, depends on the degree you can trust the historian, particularly his or her ability to understand all the available info well enough to fill in the inevitable blanks. For what it's worth, I do trust Mazzeo's reading of the sources enough to give her extrapolations the benefit of the doubt.
For those who like this kind of bio, I'd also recommend Joyce Tyldesley's Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fizzled out pretty fast
Comment: I was excited to read this but once I plopped down into my comfy chair my enthusiasm halted to a screeching halt. It read a bit like a history novel, I was expecting little more life and ease, books like this aren't something I read in a week, it took me a month to finish this and it felt a little laborious. I hate to forcer myself to read anything, after years of going though that dilemma I stopped myself but this wasn't really an option with the Vine book so I finished, but man, if I paid money for this in the story I would be pissed..
Like the other reviewer said, little too much guessing and smoothing over was going on with this surpassingly "Painstakingly researched" novel. Next time I come across a forced book like this I will pass on finishing it. I'd rather drink the champagne than read about it, or the history behind the one woman empire.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Little History, Lots of Mystery - just a Docudrama
Comment: As a lover of history, a career woman who takes pride in other women's achievements in the business world, and an oenophile (whose favorite champagne is Clicquot), I could hardly wait to read this book. In fact, the summary of the book seemed to be written just for me! What I found when I read this book, however, was very different from what I expected.
I feel as if I read a "docudrama" or some similar fictional account based loosely upon a few historical facts. The Widow Clicquot should have been a 50 page thesis for a history grad student (assuming the author was first able to unearth sufficient historical facts). Instead, the author stretched this book to 194 pages in the advance review copy - at least 100 pages past the book's historical-accuracy-breaking-point. The author did her readers a great disservice by attempting to write a biography about Madame Clicquot when the author herself repeatedly admits in the book that she could find almost no recorded history about the lady. Was this book pursued purely for commercial reasons, without regard to the lack of substantive content? Was the author too wrapped up in her intellectual love affair with the concept of Madame Clicquot to recognize that "The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Rule It" fails to tell us much of anything about how Madame created her Champagne Empire, or how she ruled it?
My greatest complaint is that Ms. Mazzeo trys to create historical fact out of thin air throughout The Widow Clicquot. I could provide innumerable examples of the author leaping to conclusions about what Clicquot felt or saw, what Clicquot did and why she did it - all without any sort of reference material to back up her conclusions. For example, the way Ms. Mazzeo writes should provide you with an idea of my problems with this book: "Barbe-Nicole probably also learned..." "Barbe-Nicole certainly learned..." "Barbe-Nicole surely did not miss..." (pages 42-43 of the ARC). Time and again throughout the book, Ms. Mazzeo make leaps of logic regarding what Madame Clicquot knew, did, loved, liked, disliked and how she felt. I understand that some assumptions must be made about a historical figure about whom so little appears to be known, but the casual way the author has managed to spin a tale that is nearly empty of hard fact while been full of gossip, innuendo and guess - well, it didn't sit well with me, and if you are a student of history, I doubt it will sit well with you, either.
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