John Briscoe Knihy

Verse collection by Northern California poet John Briscoe. Cover art by William Wolff. This book is Number 14 in The Page Poets Series.

At the core of A Child's Christmas in San Francisco are seven poems, composed, author John Briscoe tells us, by generations of San Francisco school children. Over the week before Christmas these children paired iconic San Francisco food and drink with the days of the week. Each day got a poem featuring a particular food or beverage. In this way, Briscoe observes, the young poets showed "a precocious affection for the culinary tradition and abiding spirits of Christmas in their City of St. Francis."Briscoe was one of those children. "For the occasion of those seven days, we composed ditties of juvenilia, in verse from bad to worse, to celebrate the days of the week and their paired food or beverage soulmates. From Sutro Heights to South Beach, from Bernal Heights to the Bayview, we composed, and competed, and conceded to the best of us."These then are the best productions of San Francisco's youthful versifiers. They are sly and surprisingly sophisticated comic verses that bring to life a forgotten San Francisco, one spiced with wicked innocence and fueled by the city's unique culinary offerings. Like the season it recalls, this book is celebration, a feast that is guaranteed to delight.This book is for people who have affection for San Francisco, particularly its food, drink or history; people who don't know San Francisco but have been enchanted by films, books, or legends of San Francisco; and people who enjoy whimsy for whimsy's sake.The title of this little book is unabashedly borrowed from Dylan Thomas's delighting story, "Á Child's Christmas in Wales," which is best taken in by listening to Thomas himself reading it on the BBC. This little book is a bit of history of San Francisco, history that is inconsequential in light of the city's role in the California gold rush of 1849, in light of the city's destruction and rebirth in 1906, in light of the city's role in the creation of the United Nations and in the Treaty of Peace with Japan following World War II. But it is a bit, just a bit, of the city's history. It is also a bit of poetry, and this city has produced great poets including poets of that now scorned outlaw genre, light verse. It is a bit of nostalgia, for first visits to Playland, first trips to Fisherman's Wharf, first dates.It is a bit of nostalgia for a time that never really was

The narrative chronicles the ambitious journey to create world-class wines in California, paralleling the rich legacy of French viticulture. After enduring four significant setbacks, the dream culminates in a pivotal blind tasting in Paris, coinciding with America's bicentennial. This landmark event solidifies California's status in the global wine scene, showcasing its wines as equals to the finest from France. The book captures the passion, perseverance, and transformative moments that defined this remarkable evolution in winemaking.

There is no modern commentary on the whole of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia , though commentaries on books 1 and 2 have been published by, respectively, David Wardle (1998) and Andrea Themann-Steinke. Progress is likely to be made by further commentaries on individual books and John Briscoe contributes to this with a commentary on Book 8, of particular interest because of the variegated nature of its subject matter. The commentary, like those of Briscoe’s commentaries on Livy Books 31-45 (OUP, 1973-2012), deals with matters of content, textual issues, language and style, and literary aspects. An ample introduction discusses what is known about the author, the time of writing, the structure both of the work as a whole and of Book 8 itself, Valerius’ sources, language and style, the transmission of the text, editions of Valerius, and the methods of citation used in the commentary. The commentary is preceded by a text of Book 8, a slightly revised version of that in Briscoe’s edition in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana (1998), with an apparatus limited to passages where the commentary discusses a textual problem. The book will give readers an understanding of an author once very popular, then long neglected and now enjoying a revival.