An extraordinary remembrance that’s both gut-wrenching and inspiring.
A writer recollects an astonishingly dysfunctional childhood under the violent, criminal tyranny of his father.
According to debut author Crow, his father, Thurston, was as intelligent as he was dangerous—apparently the bearer of an uncommonly high IQ, he was also alarmingly volatile. Thurston spent time in prison for nearly beating a man to death and often bragged about other murders he committed or planned to perpetrate. He was also an unrepentant thief who recruited the author to be his accomplice in crime. When Crow was not yet 4 years old, Thurston confided in him that he would soon get rid of Thelma Lou, the author’s mother. Thurston finally forced Crow to orchestrate their abandonment of her. Thelma Lou was mentally disturbed, and her combination of incompetence and motherly negligence consistently endangered her children. The author idolized his father, nevertheless, and pined to become “smart and strong and brave” just like Thurston, sometimes perversely winning his praise for ungovernable mischievousness. Crow struggled at school—he was diagnosed with dyslexia—but still managed to graduate from college and eventually win a position with the U.S. Department of Agriculture administration. But Thurston’s madness continued to haunt the author—his father tried to pull Crow’s sister, Sally, into a conspiracy to commit a crime. The author finally felt the need to stop his father and found the courage to try. Crow’s memoir is cinematically gripping—the depth of Thurston’s sociopathic depravity is as riveting as it is repulsive. The author deftly relates that his father conceived the conspiracy with cunning cynicism: “Dad’s logic was simple: He knew that if he involved Sally…she would ask for my help, even when she swore to keep silent. And he knew that I wouldn’t let anything happen to Sally.” Crow writes with confessional frankness and affectingly depicts a childhood lost to emotional and physical abuse. He also thoughtfully captures life on a Native American reservation—Crow partially grew up on a Navajo one.
An extraordinary remembrance that’s both gut-wrenching and inspiring.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9974871-7-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sandra Jonas Publishing House
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A humorous take on chronic low back pain, light enough to be held in one hand by anyone lying in traction or otherwise immobilized on a bed of pain. Spengler, a German historian and sinologist and author of the novel Lenin's Brain (1993), has produced 24 gentle essays on the disconcerting, embarrassing, funny, and painful business of living with a bad back. He traces the origins of his own problem to his brief career as an army pallbearer and the arduous rehearsals required for ``Operation Adenauer''—carrying water-filled radiators in preparation for a heavy state coffin. While state funerals might not seem the stuff of humor, Spengler proves otherwise. Back-straining romantic interludes, psychotherapy sessions (``Book and back, that's interesting,'' the therapist notes. ``They even sound alike, and both have a spine.''), mountain climbing, lunch with a film producer, an encounter with a rigorous healer whose technique combined his own manipulations with his mother's prayers, a visit with a Chinese patriarch requiring performance of innumerable full-body kowtows—all are fodder for the brain of the erudite, literate, and well-traveled Spengler, who tells story after self-deprecating little story with style and wit. Especially vivid is his description of traveling to Texas to meet his American translator and being taken out for barbecue and introduced to hot sauce and some high-stepping line dancing, the latter of which had remarkable, if temporary, pain-killing effects. While it is by no means necessary to have suffered from back pain to enjoy Spengler's delightful essays, this would be the perfect gift for anyone who ever has.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-5552-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
This solid but too disparate collection of essays and panel discussions (drawn from a series of 1995 symposia celebrating the centenary of his birth) revisits Wilson's life, work, and legacy. Though he longed to be a novelist, Wilson found his greatest success with such classic critical and historical works as Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and To the Finland Station. He had a true gift for elucidation and was keenly enough attuned to the subtleties of his culture to become an active shaping force. In the words of Random House editor Jason Epstein: ``He will eventually prove to be one of the greatest of our writers. Not so much for his individual works . . . but as perhaps the greatest teacher our literature has ever produced.'' Despite the similar accolades that lard this collection, one has to at least ask the question: Why? To critique the critic, to embed the historian in history, is to risk the law of diminishing returns, never mind academic navel-gazing. However, Dabney, a professor of English at the University of Wyoming and editor of several books by and about Wilson, has chosen most of his material well, and the list of contributors, from Arthur Schlesinger to Alfred Kazin and Louis Menand, is certainly impressive. But it is the nature of essays to be narrowly focused, and this leads here to a wallowing in minutiae. Essays on Wilson's philo-Semitism, romanticism, and lack of attention to minority writers, while well realized, are only fractionally revealing. More enlightening are the essays that broadly consider Wilson and his abiding cultural importance, particularly Louis Menand's ``Edmund Wilson and His Times'' and Paul Berman's ``Wilson and Our Non-Wilsonian Age.'' While the general reader will probably be lost throughout a good portion of this collection, it is a neat treat for die-hard Wilsonians.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-691-01672-0
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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