A successful anesthesiologist commits to writing a letter every day to his best and longest friend after learning that she had been recovering from brain surgery.
In his brief introduction to this epistolary collection, Boggs explains his project as an attempt to stimulate his friend’s brain by amusing her with “stories, some funny, some bittersweet, about what the years had done to me since we had spent all of our days together from elementary through high school.” Peppered with poems, illustrations and quotes from people like Oscar Wilde and Rodney Dangerfield, every letter ranges between two and five pages and is generally a thoughtful, personal exploration of Boggs’ present goings-on or whatever topic happens to be on his mind. In letters dated between mid-March to early May 2009, Boggs recounts personal anecdotes and intimate memories about his childhood in Albuquerque, medical school in Chicago, trips to Istanbul and Mexico City and, among other places, working temporarily in Greenville, Miss., from where he wrote a number of the letters. But mostly he writes about small-town life in Gaffney, S.C., where he and his family lived for 20 years, recounting the mayor, whom everyone called "Chicken Jolly," and the various men who have shamelessly hit on his wife. Each letter functions as an almost-essay, a highly personal exercise in memory and creativity, but collectively form something more akin to a memoir, in which he exposes his passion for Latino dance music and ’70s rock album cover art, the history of vehicles he’s owned, the stories of old girlfriends, his Buddhist-leaning protestant faith and the surprising ease of sending his second daughter off to school after the difficulty of sending his first. At times strikingly insightful and often quite witty, Boggs writes with impressive consistency, sometimes openly battling writers’ block and winning every time. Most readers will find Boggs’ resulting meandering to be enjoyable, while others will likely want more structure or depth from his musings, such as his criticism of the Google era, where he fails to go beyond lamenting that “there is something wonderful about the open-endedness of not knowing everything.” Rather than offering insight into the makings of an intimate friendship, Boggs emphasizes the results of his friendship with Dinah, one that serves as a platform for illuminating nostalgia, nonromantic love and storytelling. A sincere, original tribute to the art of letter writing, small-town living and friendship.
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463442873
Page Count: 212
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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