bookshelf

LEAVE THE DOGS AT HOME

Name: LEAVE THE DOGS AT HOME
Author: Claire S. Arbogast
ISBN: 978-0-253-01719-2

A MEMOIR

by Claire S. Arbogast ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2015

An average memoir that’s not really a guide to grief; it’s for anyone searching for what will make him or her happy—and more...

bookshelf

A debut memoir about death, grief, rebirth, and gardening.

Like the real world, the beginning of the book and Arbogast’s descriptions of her husband Jim’s impending death are tough going. As she reflects on their 27-year, on-again, off-again relationship, she paints a picture of two people who were unable to commit. When they married, they insisted that it “meant absolutely nothing.” Neither wanted a real relationship. The marriage was just for insurance purposes, and he didn’t want her to tell anyone about it. Though they married in early spring, Jim didn’t move into their house until winter. They had bought the house together a few years earlier, two acres out in the country with two big dogs. But Jim didn’t always share with her—not the information about his lymphoma or his skin cancer years earlier. He also waited months before telling her about his lung cancer, a result of his exposure to toxic chemicals during the Vietnam War. They went through lung surgery, brain surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and all the other possible treatments, but Jim eventually succumbed to the cancer. Arbogast’s story of rebuilding, or perhaps starting, a life has a persistent thread: her gardens. While dealing with her grief, she tore out gardens, added new ones, and changed entire landscapes, all the while thinking about moving to town. A few trips with and without the dogs, finding her roots, dating, and a new business dogged her search for a new direction in life. She was able to move on when she realized that her relationship was not necessarily as amazing as she once believed.

An average memoir that’s not really a guide to grief; it’s for anyone searching for what will make him or her happy—and more importantly, what will not.

Pub Date: July 2, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-253-01719-2

Page Count: 238

Publisher: Indiana Univ.

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS

bookshelf

BLACK BOY

A RECORD OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1945

bookshelf

This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.

It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.

Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945

ISBN: 0061130249

Page Count: 450

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND
by Richard Wright

- BOOK REVIEW
SEEING INTO TOMORROW
by Richard Wright ; illustrated by Nina Crews

- BOOK REVIEW
A FATHER’S LAW
by Richard Wright

bookshelf

NIGHT

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...

bookshelf

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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.