The deluxe, numbered series of each edition comes with a mink dust cover and they make lovely Christmas presents at the bargain price of $2999.95 each. Copies autographed by the author are slightly more expensive, at $3999.95 each.
Lifetime Aloft
By Zuzu Zohada
This is the poignant autobiography of a 52-year-old woman who began her career as an airline hostess in 1952 with TAE, Greece’s first postwar airline, which later became Olympic Airways. she describes her first flights in DC3s as an impressionable 17-year-old, and how she overcame her fear of entering the cockpit by braining the co-pilot with a beer bottle on the third time he pinched her bottom and made lewd suggestions.
As· the airline grew, so did her reputation as a tough cookie and whereas most of her colleagues ended up marrying pilots and successful executives, Zuzu beat a lonely path up and down the aisles of airliners, demonstrating the use of life jackets and oxygen masks, dishing out plastic trays of plastic food and collecting barf bags from airsick passengers.
Her one and only love affair was with. a handsome · Middle Easterner who courted her assiduously and promised he would marry her and take her round the world on his luxury yacht – if only she. would carry a small parcel on the plane for him on her next flight and promise not to open it under any circumstances.
Her suspicions naturally aroused, Zuzu took the parcel to the airline’s security office where it was found to contain two kebab koftas, a jar of tahini and a Tupperware of baba ghanoush. It turned out he couldn’t stand airline food and hadn’t wanted to have airport security men prying into his lunch . On the plane, he realized his parcel had been tampered with and bitterly took Zuzu to task for her lack of trust in him. She never saw him again.
She tells many anecdotes about the celebrities she met aloft during her long career, but ruefully remarks at one point that she never had the good fortune of meeting a prime minister.
Zuzu is now retired and lives in a small apartment in Glyfada, crammed with her magnificent collection of miniature liquor bottles and towelette·packets, and within earshot of the screaming jets that land and take off at Hellenikon every two minutes – a constant reminder of a lifetime spent at 30,000 feet.
A Comprehensive Guide
To Good Eating in Greece
By Diogenes Calofagas
Like his ancient namesake, Diogenes Calofagas has been roaming the Greek countryside with a figurative lighted lantern, looking for a good restaurant. And like Diogenes of old, who was looking for an honest man, Calofagas is still in search of an eating place he can come away from saying: “I’ll certainly come here again .”
Nevertheless, he has managed to single out a baker’s dozen of places that he· recommends in this slim volume which could be described as a definite guide for very tolerant and broadminded gourmets. They are restaurants where you don’t have to sit for 45 minutes before the waiter takes your order, another 90 minutes before it comes and a further 50 minutes before you get your bill; where an undeodorized youth in a grimy apron does not spread a plastic sheet over a multi stained tablecloth covering a table that does not invariably balance on three legs and needs a telephone directory under the fourth to steady it; where the same boy with the grimy apron does not bring an anodized zinc basket of stale bread and paper napkins which he throws on the table with a handful of cutlery; where the salt cellar is not stuffed with grains of rice and has plugged holes and a ring of verdigris on the metal cap; where the menu does not come in a thick plastic folder and is completely illegible because the plastic has dimmed with age and is no longer transparent; where an expensive hi-fi cassette console and amplifier does not feed a battery of speakers strung along the walls with the top 40 from Anatolia blaring at 120 decibels; where a family of fifteen, including grandparents and two-year-olds, does not sit at the next table, making valiant attempts to drown the music with high-pitched whining, loud gossip and heated arguments; where a feeble exhaust fan in a hole in the wall does not cope with clouds of tobacco smoke and the pungent smells of frying fish and grilled meat; where even orders that have just come off a hot grill do not manage to arrive at the table stone cold.
Readers will be surprised to learn that such places do exist and Mr Calofagas is to be commended on his assiduity in discovering them and on his detailed descriptions of their bill of fare. In his haste to catch the Christmas lists, however, it is unfortunate that the author has neglected to give the addresses of these restaurants or the towns in which they are located. It is to be hoped that this vital information will be contained in the second edition of what will obviously become a best-seller.
The Church at the Crossroads
By the Reverend Archimandrite Constantinos Stavrokopis
I opened the pages of this book expecting to read all about the recent crisis between the Church and the Papandreou government over the law by which church property is to revert to the state. Instead, I was delightfully surprised to find that the “church at the crossroads” is none other· than the 12th century Byzantine church of St Malachias the Prophet standing at the crossroads between the villages of Kato Neohori and Ano Neohori in northern Epirus, of which the Rev. Stavrokopis is the parish priest.
He describes the intricate stonework of the church, which is badly in need of repair after eight centuries of wear and tear, the intricately carved altar screen, considerably blurred by time and the beautiful frescoes, so blackened with smoke and age that they are hardly discernible – at least they all look that way in the photographs, which were taken by the good Father himself with an old Brownie camera and no flash on a cloudy day.
Give Us Back Our Marbles
By Yannakis Epanastatis
In this remarkable first novel, young (11-year-old) Yannakis Epanastatis displays a literary skill and narrative dexterity that should take him far. The story begins with a stern schoolmaster confiscating the marbles of a group of boys who have continued playing with them in the school yard after the bell for classes has rung. Crying “give us back our marbles!” the boys occupy the school and after they have held out for eight days and lived on nothing but Mars bars and Papadopoulos biscuits from the school’s candy store, the principal relents and gives them back their marbles.
Toughened by this experience, each member of the group goes on to achieve notoriety as a grown-up in, as the author puts it, “politics, industry, banking and other forms of organized crime.” There are rumors that Dino de Laurentis is dickering for the screen rights to this fast-moving, action-packed novel, with Charles Bronson slated for the starring role.
