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MISGIVINGS

Name: MISGIVINGS
Author: C.K. Williams
ISBN: 0-374-19984-1

MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, MYSELF

by C.K. Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000

Sad, almost grim, rewarding.

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Award-winning poet Williams (Repair, 1999) looks back on his parents' unhappy marriage, a mix of personalities that was

guaranteed from the start to produce some sparks—and did. Williams's family was in most ways a typical middle-class Jewish family of the post-Depression, postwar era. His father was a businessman who achieved success only relatively late in life, transforming the family's circumstances from dire need to relative comfort. An imposing figure, Dad was a stern and uncompromising man who, by his own choice, never apologized to anyone—a fiercely unhappy fellow. Mom was a lovely but utterly self-involved woman of great fragility, someone who never quite adjusted either to deprivation or sufficiency. Williams opens his slender memoir with a recollection of his first words to his father's dead body, "What a war we had," leaving readers to expect a sordid tale of incest or abuse—yet, mercifully, the family history is a surprisingly conventional one, littered with the kind of little battles that everyone has experienced. Williams explores these skirmishes with considerable fairness to all the participants and that, too, is a nice change of pace from the standard-issue grudge-bearing family memoir of today. Told in a series of short takes—no chapter is longer than four or five pages—this is a thoughtful excavation of ordinary family life, a refreshing change from the usual tiresome dirty laundry. Williams brings a poet's sensibility to the world of familiar people and common pursuits, and he is capable of carrying an unusual amount of insight into the psychology of family life. As more boomer-generation writers age (and as more of their parents die), we can expect to see an ever-growing number of such memoirs—but probably very few of them will be better written than this.

Sad, almost grim, rewarding.

Pub Date: April 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-374-19984-1

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW THE NOBBLE WAS FINALLY FOUND
by C.K. Williams & illustrated by Stephen Gammell

- BOOK REVIEW
REPAIR
by C.K. Williams

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SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

FROM LBJ'S GUNS AND BUTTER TO REAGAN'S VOODOO ECONOMICS

by Hobart Rowen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1994

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Strong language and strong medicine about the decline of the American economy, but marred by overwrought prose and Monday- morning quarterbacking. Rowen, a columnist for the Washington Post, attributes America's economic decline not to unfair trading practices by Japan or other external factors. It is, he says, a case of ``self- strangulation.'' Rowen examines the men and women who have made economic policy since the Johnson administration. Without attributing any venality (other than perhaps the playing of partisan politics) and admitting that people did the best they could, he nonetheless does assign blame for the low economic state to which the nation has sunk. Emerging from WW II as the only country with an industrial base untouched by war, the US was the most powerful nation on earth. Then, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, it went from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. Rowen ignores JFK, whom he knew personally and who arguably set in motion events leading to the problems Rowen cites. The current crisis, he argues, was initiated by Johnson's Vietnam adventure, which crippled the Great Society and set up a virulent inflationary cycle in its attempt to have both guns and butter. The blunders of LBJ gave way to Nixon's disastrous wage- and price- control attempts, and the abandonment of the gold standard. Ford and Carter were hamstrung by OPEC and were, according to the author, nothing short of inept. By far his harshest criticism is leveled at Reagan's ``voodoo economics,'' with its vain hope that wealth would trickle down from the top. Rowen also attacks Congress, describing it as spineless. For the future, he says, Americans will have to adjust to the economic rise of Asia, focus on high-tech industries, and become less greedy. Rowen's case is compelling, if not totally convincing. He also gives readers a poignant mini-memoir about the life of a newspaperman covering the powerful.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8129-1864-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Times/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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CHRISTINA STEAD

A BIOGRAPHY

by Hazel Rowley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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An absorbing biography that will help Stead's fans place her fiction in the context of her life and may well attract new readers to her work. Christina Stead (190283), who was born and died in Australia (about which, writes Rowley, she was ``both nostalgic and patronising''), did her writing during her years in Europe and the US. Although she tapped real events and people for her fiction—and not just for her autobiographical novels, including the superb The Man Who Loved Children—she could be secretive in her private papers, identifying people by fictional names, writing in code, and ultimately destroying many documents. Despite this obstacle, Rowley (an Australian academic, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University) offers a coherent and convincing portrait that reaches back into a youth in which Stead was overshadowed by her father, who first instilled in her a lifelong socialist orientation, insecurity about her appearance (he dubbed her ``Pig Face''), and a yearning to be adored by a man. When she arrived in London in 1928, Stead found just the man—William Blake (originally Blech), whom Rowley succinctly describes as a ``Marxist investments manager who seemed to know something about everything.'' Blake hired her to be his secretary, and Stead accompanied him to Paris, where their romance flourished—despite a wife who would not divorce Blake for 23 years. When the bank employing Blake collapsed, the pair fled to New York. Stead's writings earned only modest royalties even when favorably reviewed, and Blake could not find work, so they returned to Europe in a consistently difficult hunt for economic security that gave their lives a nomadic flavor. By 1949, Stead said to a friend, ``I have been a writer, quite unsuccessfully for twenty years,'' although a revival of interest in her work, which began in the mid-1960s, helped her return to Australia in 1969 as a famous author and ``Official Personage.'' A welcome study of an underrated author. (16 pages of photos, not seen)