by Bonnie Blodgett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2010
An uneven book that gains surprising power as it moves toward the end.
Combination popular-science book/memoir of a gardener who lost her sense of smell.
The Garden Letter publisher Blodgett (Midwest Top 10 Garden Guide, 2004, etc.) discovered one day that her olfactory sense had gone haywire. All the worst odors she could think of—rotting garbage, decaying flesh, animal waste—were invading her nose in nauseating waves. The author learned from a doctor that her olfactory receptors had been wiped out, probably by the burning blast of an over-the-counter homeopathic nose spray that she had taken to fight off a head cold. What she smelled, the doctor informed her, were actually olfactory hallucinations due to a condition called phantosmia. It was as though her nose and brain were trying desperately to remember what the world smelled like. Within weeks, however, all olfactory sensations ceased, just in time for Christmas. Gone were the aromas of fir branches, candles, cookies and sweets. The progression of her condition into anosmia—total absence of scent—led Blodgett into a black hole as she pondered what she had lost and how hopeless she felt to convey it. Her loss, however, is the reader’s gain, as it inspires by far the best writing in the book. Perhaps overcompensating for the condition, the author became a sponge, soaking up everything she could read and learn about “the primal sense,” from medical research to Proust. Her book, which starts unpromisingly in the chirpy tone of a magazine feature, suddenly develops depth, pathos and poetry as it progresses. Blodgett succeeds in raising awareness about this misunderstood, underappreciated sense and how it heightens the pleasure of being alive, even as it plays a subtle role in keeping us alive. “Smells may be slow to register cognitively,” she writes, “but they operate with superb efficiency subliminally.” So, too, does Blodgett in this book, as she develops from a slightly dizzy suburban gardening enthusiast into a three-dimensional, suffering, intellectual human being.
An uneven book that gains surprising power as it moves toward the end.Pub Date: June 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-86188-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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