by Dee Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2014
A lightweight curiosity that will find sympathy with readers frustrated with the conventional rat race.
His was 150 square feet and hers was 84, but Henry David Thoreau and newcomer Williams find significant common ground in their little abodes.
Though Thoreau didn’t spend a lot of time regaling us about living in his cabin by Walden, and Williams spends a great deal of time describing living in hers, they shared the same desire: to pare down their lives. “I imagined,” she writes, “I’d learn something about myself by stripping down to the basics—by living with two dinner plates, three spoons, two pairs of pants, a dress, and my wool skivvies…with humility and gratitude.” While Thoreau wandered off into the briars of transcendentalism, Williams hews to the quotidian. She was also disturbed, to say the least, by a mysterious, potentially mortal heart ailment and has a defibrillator built into her heart, which, when activated, feels “like being Tasered from the inside out.” The author amiably narrates her story of building a tiny, portable space, off the grid (except for a propane heater), complete with a composting toilet and enough room to turn around without having to kick the dog from the house. She chronicles how she found ancient planks of wood to use as siding, learned how to use her eyes and intuition when building, joined the “Flannel Shirt Club” and became an all-around do-it-yourself builder, minimizing unused materials. Williams also displays a light humor, though she occasionally lapses into what is not so much quirky as chirpy. However, the narrative is tempered by the somber thoughts of the deaths of two close friends. “For me,” she writes, “the idea of living small has always involved being curious—taking a look at how my day-to-day is connected to the larger world...[and] the delicate universe that sits between my ears.”
A lightweight curiosity that will find sympathy with readers frustrated with the conventional rat race.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16617-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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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