A mostly lively portrait of a woman’s language-inspired metamorphosis.
How Latin, “an undead language,” has enlivened the author’s life.
In 2008, after being laid off from her position as a book editor, 58-year-old Patty retreated to her home in rural Rhinebeck, New York, where she quickly became bored. After 34 years in publishing, including founding The Poseidon Press, the author missed the social and literary stimulation of her former life. A lover of “words, grammar, books, language,” she decided to fill a gap in her knowledge by learning Latin. In her bright, amusing debut memoir, Patty recounts the challenges and many rewards of her project as well as her transformation from successful career woman to aging retiree. In her first semester at Vassar, Patty was confronted with Latin’s mind-boggling complexities: five declensions of nouns, 38 inflections, four conjugations of verbs in six tenses, which themselves comprised 288 possible inflections. Nevertheless, she persisted with enthusiasm. A bubbly talker, she shared her newfound knowledge with friends, until she noticed their eye-rolling: “You know, Ann, not everybody cares about these things,” one friend remarked. Unfortunately, Patty shows no restraint in this memoir, including long stretches on vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. The subjunctive, the ablative absolute, the active and passive periphrastics, “the supine, the middle-voice verb, the little-used locative case, and the historical infinitive”—all make their ways into the book. Happily, grammar and translation—of Catullus, Ovid, Horace, and Virgil—often evoke Patty’s memories of two divorces, her tender friendship with a gay man who died of AIDS, the scandal that caused her to lose her imprint, her bout with “a very scary, invasive cancer,” and reflections about her mother, who had encouraged her to study Latin, “something she herself had loved.”
A mostly lively portrait of a woman’s language-inspired metamorphosis.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98022-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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