THE BOOKMAKER'S DAUGHTER: A Memory Unbound

by Shirley Abbott ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 1991

Abbott (Womenfolks, 1982) comes to terms with her father's complex legacy to her in a memoir that's beautifully written but as quiet and slow as a summer afternoon in a small southern town. The author grew up in the 1940's in Hot Springs, Ark., a town openly and cheerfully corrupt, with rigged elections, a thriving race-track gambling business, and a general harmony born of everyone knowing their place. Her father, Hat Abbott, was a dapper, complicated man, a bookmaker of the gambling sort. But he could have been a bookmaker of the literary sort, his daughter believes: Books were his religion; with a missionary zeal, he read his little daughter Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and let her browse in his set of Casanova's memoirs--anything to arouse in her the same compulsion for the printed word he felt. Then, after WW II, everything changed: The old bunch of politicians was ousted by reformers who closed clown the gambling business and put Hat out of work. With romantic ideas about becoming a gentleman farmer, he bought some land and animals and began a steady decline into poverty and despair. The civil-rights movement hit Arkansas, to Shirley's approval and Hat's scornful perplexity; the old landmarks were gradually razed to make room for the malls and Piggly Wigglys of the New South. Bright Shirley got a scholarship to college and fled Hot Springs at the earliest chance, bound for New York, steeling herself against her father's entreaties not to abandon him. Years after his death, she reflects upon the tragically wasted brilliance of Hat, who taught her two valuable lessons: to love literature, and to rely on no man for security and fulfillment. A richly detailed look at a changing world, focused through a poignant father/daughter relationship. Little overt drama here, only seismic changes in the mind and heart.

Pub Date: July 9, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION