The next time a wine snob or a chocaholic or a dieter backs you into a corner, ask if they've read Bernstein, Boynton or Peters on the subject in question.
Leonard S. Bernstein's The Official Guide to Wine Snobbery (Morrow $10.95) pokes fun but also manages to deliver a lot of useful information for people who want to learn more about choosing, serving and drinking wine.
Using Bernstein's tips, you may never again have to suffer through a wine snob's performance.
Or, alternatively, wine snobs may be able to fine-tune their performances with language and behavior they hadn't thought of yet.
The author, a children's clothing manufacturer, is an expert in one-upmanship as well as wines. He offers advice about everything from blind tastings to wine stewards -- including what to do if a wine steward refuses to take back a bad bottle.
Chocolate, The Consuming Passion (Workman $4.95 paperback) is on several best seller lists, for obvious reasons. It's a very funny book, 'written, illustrated, and over-researched by Sandra Boynton,' according to the cover copy. Miss Boynton is better known as a best-selling greeting card artist.
If she really is a chocaholic, her next best seller should be a diet book telling how she managed to stay slim while over-researching.
There's also some useful -- dare we say chocolate-coated? - information concealed in Miss Boynton's amusing prose and delightful drawings. Her tips on removing chocolate stains from fabric include treating those on non-porous materials: 'These spots are easily licked.'
The Burbank Diet, by Lola Peters (Cornerstone $4.95 paperback) takes on the entire diet guru establishment, with satires of virtually every best-selling diet book of recent memory.
For example, her spoof of 'The Beverly Hills Diet' calls for 'Noxious Combining' -- pecan pie with soy sauce or gravy on radishes, as examples.
If that's not enough to spoil your appetite, try 'Conscious Declining.' If you are offered something delicious to eat or drink, 'establish eye contact, then say: 'No, thanks.''
For those who go the exercise route, Ms. Peters' offers, among others, 'Putting on the Dog.' You muzzle a dog, toss it in the air, then 'settle it around your shoulders like a shawl.' Then you 'Walk 20 paces with dog draped around shoulders so that front legs hang straight down.'
Calories burned, she says, are 12, with a Pekingese, 132 with a standard poodle and 227 with a St. Bernard.
adv for tues Sept.
