Stone, Tom

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STONE, Tom

PERSONAL:

Male; divorced; children: Sara, Matt. Education: Yale University, graduated, 1958.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Santa Monica, CA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. E-mail—tom@tomstonestaverna.com.

CAREER:

Writer. Worked as a stage manager and assistant director on Broadway and as a screenwriter in Hollywood, CA.

WRITINGS:

Tom Stone's Greek Handbook: An A-Z Phrasal Guide to Almost Everything You Want to Know about Greece (and Are Sometimes Afraid to Ask), illustrated by Scotty Mitchell, Lycabettus Press (Athens, Greece), 1982.

Greek-English, English-Greek Dictionary and Phrase-book, Hippocrene Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Greece: An Illustrated History, Hippocrene Books (New York, NY), 2000.

The Summer of My Greek Taverna (memoir), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2002.

ADAPTATIONS:

The Summer of My Greek Taverna was adapted for audio, read by Lloyd James (unabridged; six cassettes), Blackstone Audiobooks, 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Tom Stone traded Broadway for the Greek island of Patmos, where St. John is said to have received the Book of Revelation. Stone stayed for more than two decades to write, and to fall in love with a beautiful French artist he calls Danielle in his memoir, The Summer of My Greek Taverna. An Authorlink writer called it "as much a love story as it is the grand, humorous, and sometimes bittersweet adventure of an American pursuing his dreams in a foreign land, a modern-day innocent abroad."

Stone and his wife move to Crete, where he supports his family with a job as an English-language teacher. His chance to return to his beloved Patmos comes with an offer from Theo, owner of a seaside tavern called The Beautiful Helen. Stone is an accomplished amateur chef, and Theo offers him a split of the profits if he will make an investment in the business and do the cooking. His wife, who has reservations, reminds Stone that Theo's nickname means "the oily one."

And oily he is as he avoids doing any of the work, leaving Stone to not only cook, but wait tables, and work twenty-hour days during the busy tourist season when fisherman come in early and visitors stay late into the night. Word of Stone's fine cooking spreads, and yachts dock in the harbor so that their owners can sample his specialties. Although his financial return for all his hard work was to come in August, Theo was siphoning off the profits and Stone ultimately loses all of his investment.

Smithsonian reviewer Dan Akst wrote that "in the end, though, his loss is our gain.…The taverna may have cost him some cash and even more illusions, but the experience has yielded a colorful and richly observed memoir."

Stone includes some of his favorite recipes, including traditional tzatzika, moussaka, and his own chicken Retsina. Willard Manus reviewed The Summer of My Greek Taverna for Lively Arts online, saying that it "is a worthy book: beautifully written, vibrant with humor, humanity, and truth, one of the finest documents of Greek island life on the market today."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Stone, Tom, The Summer of My Greek Taverna, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July, 2002, Mark Knoblauch, review of The Summer of My Greek Taverna, p. 1816.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2002, review of The Summer of My Greek Taverna, p. 643.

New York Times Book Review, August 18, 2002, Jillian Dunham, review of The Summer of My Greek Taverna, p. 21.

Publishers Weekly, June 3, 2002, review of The Summer of My Greek Taverna, p. 78; October 7, 2002, review of The Summer of My Greek Taverna, p. 37.

Smithsonian, September, 2002, Dan Akst, review of The Summer of My Greek Taverna.