Though fixed on what remains of some of history’s darkest moments, Rafferty’s essays, both gripping and wonderfully...
Moving reflections on the literal remembrance of acts too significant to forget.
In this riveting debut collection of lyric essays, Rafferty (Creative Writing/Univ. of Mary Washington) focuses on his “fascination with the scene of the crime, with the sites of history and what remains there,” and on “how concrete and steel and granite help us remember.” Blessed with a childhood unmarred by calamity, the author “did not believe” in his “own traumas,” so he “took on those of others” and traveled across America and Europe to explore the physical commemoration of historic acts—whether in the form of a monument, erected to celebrate a “triumph,” or a memorial, built to moor unspeakable tragedy. Though his subjects are often quite macabre, Rafferty’s empathetic analysis sheds light on topics many might find superfluous or an afterthought. In Whitefish Point, Michigan, at the site of a memorial to 29 men who drowned in November 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a storm on Lake Superior, Rafferty points to the intriguing fact that not only did divers later bring up the Fitzgerald’s bell, now a museum centerpiece, but they cast another bell engraved with the names of the dead and then lowered that and welded it in its place “535 feet underwater,” creating “a memorial that truly was, as the inscription says but never means, for the dead.” Viewing the boarded-up windows of Columbine High School or thousands of stone markers in the pastoral fields of present-day Treblinka, site of a lesser-known death camp in Poland where 800,000 Jews perished in World War II, the author delves deep into the heart of past atrocities while probing the motivations of the living to memorialize, and he comes to some provocative conclusions. Rafferty also interweaves his own personal longings in a way that brings an even greater immediacy to his observations of weighty events.
Though fixed on what remains of some of history’s darkest moments, Rafferty’s essays, both gripping and wonderfully reflective, illuminate.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-253-01907-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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