Engaging particulars of an essential life, pared to the core.
What was intended to be a deep immersion in study for graduate school—in the silence and solitude of a northern Idaho backwoods cabin—becomes a deep immersion instead in a place and its people, sharply etched.
In the early 1970s, Gruber (English/Emory Univ.) and his wife moved to the Idaho panhandle. He was attending graduate school but wanted a bit of Hesiod and Thoreau in his life, so the pair took possession of “an abandoned log cabin and forty acres of broken meadow and second-growth timber.” A selection of experiences from the next seven years is presented here in speech that’s just as anchored in the material world as is that of the man Gruber once asked about selective logging (“Hell, yes. We did it all the time. You select a mountain and you log it”). Which isn’t to say that Gruber is a friend of clear cutters; his interest lies more with the peasant’s right to windfall and mushrooms or with taking the time to appreciate a perfect tree (“In the silhouette of the white fir you would see, almost as if abstracted, symmetry, order, grace”). His neighbors are a revelation. With no 15-generations-needed-before-you-can-be-a-local nonsense, they are open and ready to be inclusive. One of them was “like the gatekeeper in a fairy tale, full of good humor and gnomic advice,” while another was seemingly placed on earth to remind Gruber “of the biblical injunction to look to the welfare of others as to our own.” The author reflects on a close encounter with a bear (“their dangerousness and our legitimate response to it”) and on the way that the edifice complex (“wanting someplace different or bigger to live in is a desire as irrational as it is common”) plays out in his remote neighborhood.
Engaging particulars of an essential life, pared to the core.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-18929-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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