SOURCE: "'A Dieter's Vision of Hell,'" in The New York Times Book Review, May 13, 1990, p. 8.

Fussell is an American educator whose writing interests include travel and cooking. In the review below, she finds A Year in Provence an entertaining look at the food and people of Provence.

I like a book that begins, "The year began with lunch," particularly when the book [A Year in Provence], year and lunch are set in Provence. And I like a lunch that begins with pastis and ends with marc, that heartwarming, heartburning firewater the French learned long ago was man's best chance of surviving the catastrophes endemic to Provence. Or so the Mayles—Peter, his wife and their dogs—discovered when they fled gray London for Provençal sunshine and bought an ancient farmhouse, a mas, between the villages of Ménerbes and Bonnieux in the Lubéron Mountains, overlooking...