by Dani Shapiro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017
A sharply observed and frequently moving memoir of a marriage.
The noted novelist and memoirist reflects on her marriage and the elusive nature of time.
To write openly about an enduring intimate relationship requires courage and tact; it’s a balancing act that can trip up the most seasoned of writers, not to mention potentially damage the sacred bond at stake. In this compelling account of her 18-year marriage, Shapiro (Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, 2013 etc.) carefully exposes the vulnerabilities that have subtly begun to surface within the relationship and, individually, within her husband and herself, over the years, sensitively addressing how time, age, and the fluctuations of success continue to impact their lives. This is the third marriage for the author. Her husband, referenced here as simply M., is a screenwriter and formerly a foreign correspondent who was based in Africa. Together, they live in a rural setting in Connecticut with their teenage son. Shapiro moves back and forth in time from their first meeting at a cocktail party in Manhattan and their subsequent wedding and honeymoon in France through the various trials they’ve faced within their marriage. These include the near-death of their young son, deaths of parents, struggles with finances, and difficulties navigating the career demands and frequent disappointments of two writers sharing their working lives from a home base. Throughout, the narrative demonstrates Shapiro’s finely tuned, poetic skills as a writer. “The stumbles and falls; the lapses in judgment; the near misses; the could-haves. I’ve become convinced that our lives are shaped less by the mistakes we make than when we make them,” she writes. “There is less elasticity now. Less time to bounce back. And so I heed the urgent whisper and move with greater and greater deliberation. I hold my life with M. carefully in my hands like the faience pottery we brought back from our honeymoon long ago….We must be handled with care.”
A sharply observed and frequently moving memoir of a marriage.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49448-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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 Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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