Novelist Nietzke (Windowlight, not reviewed) effectively brings the serious problem of homelessness to a comprehensible level in her sensitive account of a few months in the life of one woman who made her home on a Los Angeles sidewalk. As the preface notes, this is not a standard case study—names are changed, locations obscured, and conversations reconstructed- -yet one senses that the account is as honest as Nietzke can make it while still respecting the independence of the ``bag lady'' who lived on her street. Soon after Nietzke first approached 74-year-old Natalie, she began recording and trying to make sense of their encounters. In addition to facing the problems inherent in her lonely, homeless life (no toilet, no place to cook, bathe, or change clothes, no protection from the elements), Natalie displayed symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, which would make it difficult for her to adapt to life in a shelter for the homeless mentally ill, such as the one where Nietzke worked. Nietzke would bring Natalie food (e.g., bananas or a couple of boiled eggs), dispose of her packaged excrement, and occasionally try to coax her into taking a sponge bath, washing her hair, or changing some piece of her clothing. Equally important, Nietzke, with determined patience, conversed with this elderly, frightened woman—even though they couldn't always understand each other. Far from admonishing Natalie for her ways (or admonishing us for the part we play in this drama, if only by inaction), Nietzke looks at the person we want to label as different and sees similarity: ``It is terrifying to face the `givens' in life, both what we are given and what we are spared. I could be Natalie, she could be me.'' While literary style and sympathetic perspective make this book easy to read, it is the straightforward approach to Natalie herself that makes it well worth reading.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-934971-42-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Calyx Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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